I hate wacky.
Wacky is forced. Wacky is someone who tells you their nickname on your first day at a new job and claims they’re “a character”, when you know full well they’re another word beginning with C. That kind of wacky can get in the bin.
But seeing the world differently? Thinking at a slightly skewed angle? Viewing everything through a lens nobody else seems to own? That’s something else entirely – and it’s where Bristol’s Mother Vulture operate.
Already hyped by the likes of Kerrang! and Distorted Sound as potential new kings of British rock, Cartoon Violence doesn’t so much arrive as kick the door off its hinges. This is a band that somehow seem to do everything, all at once, without ever sounding like they’re trying to impress anyone but themselves. At just over forty minutes, it covers a startling amount of ground.
Take the opener. I love a pun, right? So “Mike Check” looks like a throwaway gag. It isn’t. It’s a brilliant song, setting the tone immediately – sharp, smart, and slightly unhinged in the best way. From there, “Sufferin’ Succotash!” answers the eternal question of whether Mother Vulture can write hooks: yes, they absolutely can, even when they’re wrapped in chaos.
“Treadmill” is like this if At The Drive-In listened to power pop – but still did weird shit – while “Slow Down” plays cat and mouse before turning properly heavy, hardcore-heavy at times, but without ever getting dragged into scene clichés.
Just when you think you’ve got them pinned down, along comes “The Masquerade”, an epic that piles classic-rock stacked harmonies into something urgent and modern, before “Phoenix” reminds you that any urgency here is always on their terms. “Corporate Programming” slips in a smart AI sample, while “Double Down” might just be the pivot point of the album – one of its real highlights.
There’s a sleazy, almost disco-glam stomp lurking in places, particularly as things move toward “Knuckles”, where the lyrics bite hard and the groove locks in thick and heavy. “Bedbugs” doesn’t spell everything out, but you know exactly what it feels like, and sometimes that’s better.
“La Matadora” builds into something that sounds faintly Stones-like before revealing itself as an instrumental curveball, because of course it does. And by the time we reach “For Years I’ve Been Searching” and the closer “Mountain Of Youth”, with its defiant “I’ve got nothing to prove”, it’s clear these songs aren’t just being sung to us – they’re being sung to themselves, and to the wider world.
“Cartoon Violence” is a big record. Mother Vulture are going to be a big band. But they’ll be the kind of band that leaves people slightly baffled, asking “what the hell was that?”
And honestly, when a record is this varied, this weird, and this good, that’s the only response that really makes sense.
RATING: 8.5/10
