Le Butcherettes + The Picturebooks @ Hare & Hounds, 16th October 2016

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Support for Le Butcherettes, German duo, The Picturebooks, have a dagger logo on their kick-drum, the twin tom toms approximate nuclear waste flasks way past their Hell-by date and sound equally apocalyptic. Fynn Claus Grabke [vocals, guitar] and Philipp Mirtschink [drums] have been described as, ‘…raw riders of the sonic highway.’

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Swampy wet dreams of being fellated by alligators might shed light on their visceral, stripped-down primal Blues. Grabke plays an assortment of open-tuned guitars lubricated with Gollum salivated bottle-neck industrial Delta slide. And the vocals? Circumcision by chainsaw might be an approximation. Sort of growly and sufficiently lairy to encourage KKK vigilante men to crap themselves.

Mirtschink’s drumming is weapons grade hypno-drone tribal. He appears to sweat napalm from every orifice and others (possibly not even his) besides. Drumsticks are evidently a wuss taboo. His choice of heavy-gauge mallets suggest they are tipped with Minotaur testicles. However, on closer inspection they may well have been WW1 German sick-grenades with timer-fuses removed, though the detonating delivery made that superfluous.

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Mexican tantrum, pile-driver Punkniks, Le Bucherettes, are prone to kick up an anaphylactic racket of chaotic guitar, retro late 60s weedy organ together with a tsunami toxic tight rhythm section fronted by shock-vox Teresa Suárez aka Teri Gender Bender. Allow her a ten-minute ‘attitude adjustment’ session in a locked room with Donald Trump and the World would be a much nicer and certainly safer place.

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Ice sliver princess imperial, femme fatale vulnerable – her volatile shape-shifting stage personas compete in frenzied attrition to assert their alter-ego dominance. The Specter at the Feast, the body-paralysing early morning nightmare – there are indeed weird troubling scenes inside her cold mind.

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Distorted, sometimes agonized facial contortions are matched with epileptic marionette body postures. Fragments of vocal effects verse provide barbed-wire codas to slam a song shut. Her audience invasion saw her costume transform from USAF style jump-suit to slasher-red dress complimenting both her ‘Joker’ smeared lip-stick and war-painted eyes. Not surprisingly she was singing ‘Dress Off’ Clearly, that anger-management therapy weekend at the Norman Bates motel was not a complete success. All the better for us. ‘I’m only here as your mind/Your mime/Your inferior clown.’ Harsh!

Review: John Kennedy

Photographs: Ian Dunn

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