‘The respect earned, The time gone, The end in plain sight, Nothing so healing as the human touch, As I step off the edge of the world’ (The Big Guitar Jackoff In the Sky)

The Minneapolis Uranium Club Band are back with their fourth full-length, Infants Under The Bulb, and their first in six years since 2018’s The Cosmo Cleaners: The Higher Calling Of Business Provocateurs.  And as ever, we are treated to an exhilarating journey of precisely executed yet inherently experimental punk partnered with modern-day parables and a keen eye for the absurd.

The core of the band’s sounds remains consistent with sardonically semi-spoken vocals intertwined with tautly angular guitars and a lithely limber rhythm section.  The new addition is a horn section that infuses an unexpected radiance to the jittery paranoia of opener Small Grey Man, a surreal reimagining of the mysterious real-life story of the death of an unknown man on a Sligo beach in 2009, the themes of the unsolved and the unanswered prove a recurring lyrical preoccupation throughout the album.  The horns provide a spikier presence on Viewers Like You and inject layers of vibrant depth to the swinging The Big Guitar Jackoff In The Sky.

The buoyantly infectious energy of Tokyo, Paris, LA, Milan belies what appears to be a sweeping tale of escape on swaying trains and overnight ships, with each of the cities arrived at then perishing to forces unknown, ending with the melodically intoned, repeated mantra of the names of these now lost cities.  Meanwhile, a series of spoken word vignettes, accompanied by meditative spaced-out organs, are interspersed throughout and tell the allegorical tale of The Wall (‘Oh, I didn’t realise that I was in danger.  Thank you Wall’ said the woman).  This reads as an exploration of why people are susceptible to the very idea of walled borders, wrapped up as they are in notions of impermeability, protection, and purity.

The artwork is also pretty striking and involved the band co-ordinating hundreds of local volunteers being clad in red ponchos and photographed aerially in the shape of a giant spiral.  And, quite frankly, why not.