Strange Creatures
Garage Rock
The easiest way to explain Drenge’s Strange Creatures is to use “When I Look Into Your Eyes,” the closing track, as a microcosm of the entire album. The bones of the song are simple. Even mundane. It’s a basic acoustic strum, a pretty sing-song melody, and a beat anyone could clap. But in the hands of Drenge, it becomes something much more expansive and dramatic.
The drama begins with singer Eoin Loveless’ voice, which has the wonderful ability to move between characters. Here, on “When I Look Into Your Eyes,” he’s singing with a Morrissey-esque sound, background vocals seemingly coming from chanting monks and Loveless’ guitar chiming selectively through the song. “Prom Night,” another ballad, also has an unsettling sound, but in a different way. Here, the fear rises out of a plodding beat and guitars that sound almost like a carnival organ. A saxophone comes out of nowhere and your first thought is, “did they abduct a saxophonist for this?” The saxophone, courtesy of the Loveless’ father, and most probably played of his own free will, also gives the track a very David Bowie kind of feel, which also helps to move the spooky needle.
It would be an oversimplification to say Strange Creatures sounds like an 80s post-punk album, but it’s definitely influenced by the music of that era. What’s nice about the album, though, is that it pours that decade’s hair product onto a head full of rock and roll. The woozy melody paints Eoin as the narrator in a Carrie-esque tale: visions of him lurking in an alleyway, leaning against a doorframe in noirish mode he watches the horrors unfold. “Something stepped out from under the rubble / Whatever it was it was like Halloween,” he sings. As well as the sax, there are touches of synthesizer on “Avalanches” and expansive percussion on closer “When I Look Into Your Eyes” alongside a haunting vocal chant; small additions that add to the overall feeling of fullness on the album.
On Strange Creatures the wrinkles have been ironed out. Quieted is the scrappiness of the to-ing and fro-ing of the guitar and drums during Drenge’s infant stages, instead thick layers of sound rage on. Something Drenge do particularly well is take the sickly sweet and throw it into the mud, adding a twisted element to the quotidian: “Milkshakes make me sick / Lactose intolerant” or “A boy vomits up his canteen dinner in the high-school’s honeysuckle garden.” This album still sounds undeniably Drenge-y, rattling and crashing along like a ramshackle rollercoaster; your only hope is to hold on for dear life.
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