Thalia Zedek, Jason Sidney Sanford and Gavin McCarthy return with their third album as E, to prophetically plug into our waking fever dreams

Whilst in our Covid-19-clouded times the succour of escapist artistic works is welcomed and often necessary, it’s also oddly hard not to be drawn to cultural wares that directly reflect – or at least expound upon – the realities we’re living through. Hence, many recently have been unable to resist seeking-out astonishingly on-the-nose pandemic films like Contagion and vintage TV dramas such as Survivors or literary touchstones like Albert Camus’s The Plague and JG Ballard’s broad bibliography. Somewhat inadvertently – unless the band name actually has stood for ‘epidemiology’ all along – E have delivered a third album that taps into the febrile zeitgeist with almost uncanny prescience.

From its brain-scan sleeve imagery and mordant song-titles to its austere verbalised lexicon and unremittingly tense disposition, Complications does feel spookily like a sign of our times statement, even if unwittingly so. With lines like “Don’t isolate me, don’t erase me, quarantine” (“Contagion Model”), “The sickness is rising” (“Miasma”), “I join you / By virus” (“Acid Mantle”) and the lockdown-fitting “You’ll sit in the park / Watch out for the cops” (“Dead Drop”), this could conceivably be a coronavirus concept album, enabled by a bit of time-travel.

Stepping back a little though, to avoid overly convenient contemporaneous life-on-to-art projection, and we find that this nine-track collection captures the ‘supergroup’ trio of Thalia Zedek (vocals/guitar; Come, Uzi, Thalia Zedek Band), Jason Sidney Sanford (vocals/guitar/effects; Neptune) and Gavin McCarthy (vocals/drums; Karate) in remarkably rude health. Moving away from the noise-rock heaviness that crept into 2018’s more clotted Negative Work, back towards the nimble nerviness that drove 2016’s eponymous debut, whilst progressing further with greater democratisation of lead vocal and lyric-writing duties, Complications could be the band’s best all-round record to date, irrespective of its current thematic relevance.

Hence, with the Zedek-led tracks we’re treated to the spiralling epilogue of “Caught” and the searing call-and-response six-string swerves of “Sunrise”, which both bring in welcome Eleven: Eleven-era Come-like flashbacks but with a refreshed twist. Elsewhere, Sanford heads-up the brilliantly broiling Fugazi-meets-early-Talking Heads angularity of “Acid Mantle”, the prowling swelling creepiness of “Gelding” and the low-slung post-punkisms of “Miasma”. McCarthy certainly ups his ante further this time too, compellingly channelling Peter Prescott’s prized singing-drummer moments in Mission of Burma, with the careening “Contagion Model”, the thuggish “Dead Drop” and the churning “Like a Leaf”, to the point where his ramped-up role arguably makes the album the dark overall pleasure that it is. Such individualism doesn’t detract from the collective group attack of the tightly-knitted arrangements however. Moreover, the threesome resoundingly come together into the disorientating hive-mind finale of “Apiaries Near Me”, which features an oblique duet between Zedek and Sanford buried by intermeshed guitars and tempestuous drums.

Whilst in some ways the launch timing of Complications might be bad – especially as an extensive European tie-in tour has been postponed at time of writing – in other aspects its appearance is expertly geared-up to act as an admirable aural pressure-release soundtrack in the testing turbulence of 2020.

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Adrian
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