(((O))) : AAA Gripper – We Invented Work for The Common Good

A new band of old hands AAA Gripper play a kind of experimental post-hardcore/post-punk type of deal that’s familiar enough to be immediate without being predictable or falling into tired formulas. It’s exploratory and yet compact, tough and rhythmic with wild abrasive guitar and sardonic vocals. The title of their debut We Invented Work for The Common Good is the sort of phrase you can imagine greeting workers as they filed into the imposing edifice on its cover in the not so distant past. Ringing with Victorian paternalism it is perhaps best taken with a couple of pinches of salt.

A chirpy whistle and a hungover groan introduce us to ‘Lower Demons’ who turn out to be those summoned forth by the dark rituals of corporate team building exercises. The album’s prevailing mood is tense and agitated. It shifts around under grey skies, rubbing against the grain of the days, looking for something to ease the misery, looking for comfort, for a pool of sunshine to lay down in. The scornful album title itself comes from the second track ‘Wasp Women’ a remarkable vision conjuring up a female wasp biker gang and taking flight with them into the unknown, a limitless world beyond mere use or function.  

AAA Gripper might be disenchanted by the emotional terrain but they are not defeated, fighting to re-enchant the world, to find the magical glint in the mundane, the poetry in the prosaic. Gifting the band with its name the refracted perspective of the magnificent ‘The Arcade Claw King’ spins a tale of transcendence through the plastic eyes of a stuffed toy prize amid the low rent glamour of the amusement arcade, “this is the life, the lights, the music. ..”  

The words, by M Edward Cole, are attention grabbing and reward your closer attention but they came along later, this is a drum and bass record. That is, it was built from the rhythm section up. Joe Thompson and Lee Richardson playing for the love of it, for the escape, recording hours of music. Eventually they began to edit it down and got the other two in to flesh things out. There’s some great guitar on here from Thomas House but as you listen to the album you realise it’s never driving the tracks, it decorates them in abstracted blocks, floating chords, circling lines. He plays with restraint, leaves a lot of space so the more full-on sections have greater impact. There’s no solos to speak of, no choruses either really unless you count the occasional repetition of lines, but the songs are so well structured you barely notice.  

They cite Can and No Means No as inspirational guides and you can hear that, although they don’t sound like them. The results remind me more of The Ex or The Fall while, again, not expressly sounding like either. Their own music is a deft and, ahem, gripping take on similar approaches. Born of a conversation at the label’s own in house festival and featuring members of Wrong Speed bands Hey Colossus, Joeyfat and Sweet Williams, We Invented Work for The Common Good is perhaps the most Wrong Speed record to ever be played at the wrong speed. Aligned in the cause of music as psychic defence against the horrors, beyond the personnel involved a statement accompanying the release seems to work just as well for label as band “Music is therapy. They think it’s part of the bread and circuses. We know it’s armour. We know it’s weaponry”.