ALBUM: "There Are No Happy Endings" - Engerica (Sanctuary, 2006)

Sometimes a band comes along who, although they fit a certain set of criteria, are quite unlike any other in their approximate genre. If Alkaline Trio and My Chemical Romance are the cool, smartly-attired scene-leaders of emo-punk and Billy Talent the wild, ragged understudies kicking against their own pop sensibilities with twitchy-eyed fervour, Engerica are the brattish, antisocial younger brother sitting in the corner yukking wildly at how stupid they think the whole thing is. Hilariously obnoxious live (with lead singer and perpetually-gurning prankster David Gardner often going out of his way to actively insult and antagonise the audience), in many respects they’re like the nasty little fucker on the cover of Ugly Kid Joe’s early albums, the kind of neglected second-born who goes around setting fire to things and flips you the bird as soon as he gets chastised for it. A deranged, cartoonish B-movie horror hybrid of Mclusky, Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster and The Misfits, they’re the unwanted bastard offspring who’s most at home torturing cats or running amok on Halloween, a walking ASBO waiting to happen: an all-puking, all-mewling ball of rage gobbing phlegm in your face while gleefully pointing at their own erection then deriding you for being gay.

Disgust, degradation, contempt and self-loathing are Engerica’s stock-in-trade. Masturbatory themes and recurring images of self-mutilation, decay, suicide and immolation abound on their incendiary debut album, from the wantonly fetishistic (“You fantasise of German wives in leather”) to the profane (“Jesus wept, and gave me a hard-on”), the carnal (“Yeah, I could tell by the smell, I was gonna get it”) and the shameful (“God damn! I had to see you naked”). Moans of “Oh, God…” can occasionally be heard buried deep in the mix, as if you’re listening in on someone who’s just found that their urine’s hideously discoloured. Throughout, there’s a perverse revelling in the rancour of sexuality at its most primal and base, together with an obsession for the physical by-products of sexual activity: blood, sweat, semen, disease.

Tracks like Trick or Treat?, Crooked Sex and Funeral Song are warped tales of people who find validation for their own failings in the humiliation and exploitation of others - “Your daddy was a poor man / Well so was mine!” Gardner taunts invitingly at his plaything on the former; “Your breath stinks - so kiss me…” he hisses lustily on the latter. You get the impression that if Engerica were a movie, they’d be a cross between Kids, The Idiots and David Cronenberg’s Crash, unflinchingly depicting the antics of a group of wilfully thoughtless teenagers who go around fucking disabled people just because they find them so grossly fascinating. When Gardner sings “We are the vaccinated, bow-legged and so frustrated” on Crooked Sex, he hints at the kind of dark feelings of revulsion and arousal buried deep inside all of us which few dare to speak of and even fewer dare acknowledge. The overall effect is akin to finding the diary of a rapist or serial killer and reading all their most intimate sexual thoughts laid bare in graphic detail. It may not always be pleasant or even comprehensible to the rational mind - but by god, you can’t take your eyes off it.

There’s an effortless, irreverent wit to Engerica’s lyrics and the construction of their music. Riotously inventive moments of vocal phrasing pop up all over the place - witness the way the way Gardner rolls words off his tongue in the second verse of Funeral Song, screams out impenetrable lines of fast-writ nonsense in The Smell and meanders his way through the brilliantly-titled It Was a Goddamn Suicide! (sample lyric: “My shoes are rubbish, my hair is a mess / My life is a failure, and I’m constantly depressed”) like a bemused Dennis Pennis. Rhythmically the songs chop and change at regular intervals, hacking hooks in half and putting them back together however they damn well please – never more effectively than in the brutal final seconds of My Demise, a relentless, Therapy?-esque 2-minute assault which is the aural equivalent of being stabbed repeatedly by a bloody great knife. When the overdrive kicks in, beneath virtually each song there’s a layer of throat-shredding yelps from Gardner and bassist Mike Webster, with drummer Neil-Ross Gregory rounding off a remarkably meaty production job with some of the most brutal, machine-gun-like clubbing since Dave Grohl started battering his kit to buggery back in 1991.

There are two key songs on this record. The first is Roadkill, a criminally-overlooked former single which – had it been properly promoted – ought to have become one of the most popular rock tracks of recent years. Too often, Nirvana are used as a catch-all reference point for bands who marry melody to a raging undercurrent of distorted guitars; the point that’s often missed, however, is that what Nirvana sometimes lacked in finesse they compensated for in both spirit and attitude. It didn’t matter what they played or how they sang it - what mattered was the sheer ball-busting energy of the delivery. It’s no small compliment then to suggest that Roadkill bears favourable comparison to Cobain’s own Breed as its choppy opening riff erupts into a propulsive fireball of surging rock. Midway through, there’s a quirky but effective 50s-style dance breakdown (“Shake your finger, shake your finger!”) before a drum-roll kicks in, a series of increasingly frenzied grunts appear and the whole affair detonates in an awesome display of pummelling, molten fury as Gardner howls out indiscernible lyrics in a thinly-veiled steal from the vocal-line of tourette’s. One of the few (semi-) serious tracks on the album, this is what Nine Black Alps might sound like if they had any fucking bollocks to back up their solid but ultimately rather perfunctory take on modern rock.

The other notable standout is Misery Guts, probably the darkest of the bunch. Constructed around a sinewy descending riff which spirals further and further down with each bar, this song feels very different to any other track on the record and consequently has a real emotional drive which, in their haste to keep two fingers permanently waving, the others perhaps lack. By turns witty, caustic, immature and perversely literate, the tone of the album is so relentlessly self-mocking that we are never really allowed to ascertain which songs are sincere and which aren’t – certainly the boo-hoo title of this track may be a deliberate attempt to deflect attention away from what appears to be a more honest and confessional statement of isolation and disconnection (“I’m in the special crowd, but I don’t feel special now / I’m in the empty chair; there’s one just over there”). It ends with the words “I’ll write a note” repeated over a haunting, ghostly moan before its final chord fades away – while it may simply be an attempt to add another dimension to the band’s knowingly unsociable personality, the track itself lingers long in the memory.

Far more than just a savvy, snotty, hard punk-rock album, There Are No Happy Endings is a triumph because it goes one degree further. While the band would no doubt balk at the suggestion that they’d created anything resembling art (it’s certainly hard to make such a case for a record which contains lines as deliberately lowbrow as “Liar, cheater, bogey-eater / Look out everyone, here comes Peter!” and features the phrase “I look like an arsehole” as one of its choruses), what they do manage is a stubborn approximation of the form. One of the acknowledged tenets of any work of art is that it creates its own world which draws you in and keeps you locked in a cohesive and coherent pattern of its own internal codes and images. To this extent, the album succeeds gloriously. The ferocity of its overall tone and pervading sense of degradation are relentless throughout - from the bludgeoning racket of 60-second opener Reasons to be Fearful Pt. 1 right through to the stark cover image of three empty nooses and its morbidly sarcastic title, the album creates and exudes its own unique, distinctive aesthetic. Easily the best LP of its kind since Billy Talent’s debut, this is a challenging (indeed, at times downright uneasy) but frequently hilarious and vital piece of work which deserves to find the biggest possible audience. Who, presumably, the band would then proceed to hurl abuse at with gleeful abandon.