Review of Suicide Pact—You First (1999)

by Ben Myers for Kerrang! (1999)

The Irish rockers with their first offering since the collapse of their label A&M.

Everyone loves a come-back, particularly if it’s a triumphant one that pisses in the face of adversity. Following the dissolution of their label A&M last year, doubt was thrown over the future of Ireland’s finest rock export since Thin Lizzy. Semi-Detached—the album that preceded them being dropped—was a fine collection of Therapy?’s bubblegum metal, albeit slightly predictable. But the brilliantly named Suicide Pact—You First should put the Irish cads back on the Britrock throne once and for all.

This, then, is not so much a come-back, but more of a ‘f**k you’ record to the paymasters who dumped Therapy? In doing so, they inadvertantly inspired an album that is patently not designed for chart action, but is perhaps their greatest work yet. Not since the raw hardcore sounds of 1991’s Babyteeth have Therapy? sounded so pumped up, twisted and ready to fire on all cylinders once again.

Suicide Pact … is a relentless record that runs the gamut of emotions and is bursting with a thousand ideas. Anyone questioning the future of the guitar need only pick up this album. It’s metal, it’s punk and so much more.

On album opener He’s Not That Kind Of Girl we get Andy Cairns doing his best Danzig holler over a song that manages to sound like both Van Halen’s ace boogie hit Hot For Teacher and Iron-Man-era Black Sabbath. Throw in a jazz break and some fine dark Elvis lip-curling and you have a song that’s infinitely better that it sounds on paper. If it’s released as a single, the boy-band masses won’t know what’s hit them.

Wall Of Mouths follows—a dark swirl of fuzzed-up sleazy guitars which is the perfect mix between Fugazi, The Fall and The Stooges. Jam Jar Jail, on the other hand, is glammy smack rock at its loosest. Hate Kill Destroy is preceded by a quote from German philosopher Nietzsche: a man who, quite aptly, believed that superhuman endurance led to success. It’s a song that sees Cairns howling spit like a redneck John Lydon after one too many swigs on the moonshine.

Suicide Pact … is a relentless record that runs the gamut of emotions and is bursting with a thousand ideas. Anyone questioning the future of the guitar need only pick up this album. It’s metal, it’s punk and so much more.

God Kicks, allegedly recorded in the woods at night, is equally as dark and tackles the issue of Northern Irish Sectarianism while sounding like bar room bards Tom Waits or Nick Cave with the claustrophobic atmospherics of Joy Division. Then there’s the sub two-minute burst of Other People’s Misery, to show today’s hardcore kids how twisted brutality should really be done.

There are further delights too. Final song Sister is five minutes of post-punk paranoia that lies between the dark acid-sounds of late ’60s experimental garage rock and the cooler end of goth, which gives way to a truly disturbing secret track of never-ending cello-lead bleakness, poetry, screaming and Mogwai-style sound-shaping. Therapy? have returned to their roots and have never sounded better.

Rating: 4/5.

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