‘Your stove boiling over, Your stove has gone cold, Where have all the plates gone, Our dinner sitting old, Have they all heard of refrigerator’s gold’ (Refrigerator’s Gold)

Puppet Wipes return with their second album and follow-up to 2022’s The Stones Are Watching And They Can Be A Handful.  The scrappy, lo-fi aesthetic that defined their debut is still firmly in evidence on Live Inside, but with the band having expanded to a trio, their melding of punk experimentalism and enticing pop sensibility now feels a little more fully fleshed out.

The roots of all three members can be traced back to the more offbeat reaches of DIY punk, including Lumpy Records alumni Glitter and Janitor Scum.  Puppet Wipes take this same aesthetic and then ferment it in a vat of demented invention.  Scratchy guitars, discordant electronics, and ragged percussion restlessly morph into new shapes, some barely formed, others vividly alive.  This restiveness is more than matched by the shapeshifting vocals as they fluidly segue from beguiling melodies to disquieting murmurs and dread inducing lullabies in a haze of fractured absurdities.

What emerges is as intoxicating as it is unsettling.  And the highlights come thick and fast – from the unhinged Holding Ceremony Over His Wife’s Corpse to the melancholy shrouded, rather beautiful Refrigerator’s Gold, and then from the jauntily contagious The Una Bomber Used To Come And Dance At Events to the gothic charged Rounds And Rounds.  It is a richly dark delight.  There is even a languorous cover of Do You Wanna Touch My Safety Pin?, the B-side to the sole release from 1977 UK punks, Septimus.