Review of Semi-Detached (1998)—No Gore. Blimey!

by Victoria Segal for NME (March 28th, 1998)

Porn. Bloody syringes. A gory knife. A bottle of pills. A dead rat. You only had to glance at the artfully squalid contents of the dustbin lurking beneath the CD of ’94’s Troublegum album to understand the low level of Therapy?’s preoccupations.

Once the kind of kids who write to their Death Row pen pals in Florida in between their paper round and double Maths, they stuck an axe into the classic adolescent psyche, and twisted it hard.

And it worked, too, all that growling about knives and anguish and knowing how Jeffrey Dahmer feels. All very well, but it’s unlikely the famous serial killer would have reciprocated in the mutual appreciation stakes, even ignoring the fact that he’s dead and, anyway, he probably preferred Whitesnake. Dismembering corpses, eating the organs and saving the rest for later is hardly in the same league as writing a few chirpily evil rock songs. Basically, Therapy? always provided a pantomime of pain, an ‘Oh yes he is! Oh no he isn’t!’ approach to insanity, with ‘Look out he’s behind you!’ glee at every curse, every splash of blood.

… Semi-Detached is still a dream ticket to a comfortable nightmare, the perfect solution for any alienated soul who hasn’t got the bone structure for Marilyn Manson make-up ….

Clues were given with their last album, the grim-faced Infernal Love, but with Semi-Detached it’s a relief to find Therapy? have decisively toned down the Hooded Claw cackling, all the while maintaining their mix of rock-friendly indie and indie-friendly rock. “The roads are busy/So pick the one you know”, sings Cairns on The Boy’s Asleep, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. There might be less in the way of satanically bad Screamager-type puns, messy brain-splatter, and Norman Bates-chic, yet the same twin engines of self-loathing and testosterone power the record. “Oh shit/Here comes morning”, barks Cairns on Heaven’s Gate, every inch the normal, well-adjusted young man. They haven’t slathered the songs with orchestral pomp to give them the stamp of maturity (there is a cellist but that’s always a good thing) or proudly returned with an embarrassingly out-of-touch electronica set, but they have found other, more familiar ways of texturing their music.

The opening Church Of Noise sees them going psycho(silly)billy, the singer adopting a squealing falsetto while a piano is hammered like they’ve got Jerry Lee Lewis in for some proper hellraisin’. Tramline is an industrial grind over the doomy goth guitar the Prodigy used on Breathe, leaving you with the unwholesome vision of Cairns in stick-on green horns and kohl, but best is closing track The Boy’s Asleep, where new cellist Martin McCarrick, is employed to stormy effect. Cairns sounds so exhausted he can barely speak, yet somehow sings like Thom Yorke with a couple of Rollins-like daggers tattooed on his biceps. This is clearly not the work of a band that yearn for stadium Valhalla, that dream of giant lemons and dancing girls on stage—something bands at this stage in their career generally do start contemplating, the fools—and Semi-Detached is all the more admirable for that.

Sometimes the variations can seem like Frankenstein-style transplants on to the bodies of otherwise healthy songs, leaving you craving some brutal trepanation. The piano at the beginning of Safe is impressive in that it manages to get you thinking of a gut-barging contest between Pavarotti and James Hetfield, yet unsurprisingly, it doesn’t really mesh with the song.

Other tracks are just too slight. Don’t Expect Roses is more Green Day than Big Black, all jaunty youth club pop and anti-romanticism, while Tightrope Walker has the cheesewire guitar lines that Joey Santiago used to have as a tourniquet all those years ago. All well and good until you realise even Bush can ‘do’ the Pixies these days.

More Geoffrey Boycott than Jeffrey Dahmer, Semi-Detached is still a dream ticket to a comfortable nightmare, the perfect solution for any alienated soul who hasn’t got the bone structure for Marilyn Manson make-up and isn’t yet ready to swap their Oasis t-shirt for a fishnet body-stocking. They might have wiped off the blood, but Therapy? still have a heart. And for once, it’s not accompanied by someone else’s liver.

Rating: 6/10.

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