Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
That first experience is always regarded as the most satisfying, the initial taste that dances on the tongue, which rages in heat, which is delicate to savour like chocolate, this is moment that your senses have been crying out for, and when you understand that the thousands of hours that have gone into chasing that primary encounter, that engagement or confrontation with the beast of decadence, then you know it is all worth the wait for the sensual and the aggressive to arrive and surround you at the same time.
It is not love until it has been declared, the Shove N’ Love of the playground may be that first emotional display of what’s to come, but until you dig beneath the covers, it is a mystery, an enigma waiting to be unwrapped, to be explored. Undeclared love means only heartbreak in the mind of the would-be proclaimer, it takes courage, fortitude, to stand out in the middle of a possibly indifferent crowd and show them just exactly what love, what a sound of expression can be.
It is confidence that expression is heard, and Queens’ latest heroes, Sickwalt, have that in abundance, and the Shove N’ Love that they have offered to world is not just the ripple of applause that the tongue demands after the first taste, it is the whole chocolate factory set alight and the melting beauty that grips the listener is only surpassed by the sense of the delicious in the air.
The names are there to protect, not the innocent, but the device into which the genre demands, the punk-style ethic which sees titles such as Die Like Belushi, Everybody’s Lucifer, Butcher’s Dog, Hey Devil and Punk Almighty add intrigue and beautiful foreboding, a sizeable amount of justified and expressed anger, and the poetic dash to which Punk thrives, and you have an album not just built on name, but on emotion and intensity, the result of which is a sense of purity and pleasure.
Chemistry dictates, music provides and Sickwalt have set out to prove that the two can be bosom buddies as well as hard-hitting sparring partners in the ring of eternal aggressive delivery. Shove N’ Love is the direct result, unapologetic, Punk-filled drama, fun, critical, but no bluster or empty calorific filling, for this is an album captured in the raw, the bean of life at its most crucial, and one that does not just politely ask to be listened to but elbows its way to the forefront of the day and raises the stakes of how you perceive greatness.
Sickwalt’s Shove N’ Love is out now and available from X-Ray Records.
Ian D. Hall