I was today years old when I learnt that the word ‘torres’ means ‘towers’ in English. Until this morning, I thought it meant ‘Spanish striker who did the business at Liverpool but didn’t quite hit the same heights at Chelsea’. It seems unlikely that Wolverhampton indie punks Mistrusted care much for either team, nor would they care much for the fact that this review of their third album Torres Abren Fuego (‘Towers Open Fire’) has so far been focussed less on the music and more on the beautiful game and translations. As a Spanish person would say, “Estoy divagando…”
First track ‘Flat Earth’ appears to begin with an excerpt from Care Bears (“When my tummy turns red, say something and I’ll sing it back!”), which is simultaneously not punk and very punk. Over mandolin-like guitar, frontman Ken Sutera sings “Here I go again – it’s the world I’m dreaming of” before crunching electric guitar buts in. ‘Girlfriend You’ve Changed’ sounds like Black Flag doing Joy Division’s ‘A Means to an End’.
The title track ‘Towers Open Fire’ opens with a snare-heavy Slipknot rumble and sounds not too dissimilar to Idles. The paranoid, proggy lyrics include “Silver owl through the night / Silver owl take thy flight / Silver owl seek and find.” Eat your heart out, J K Rowling! (Or Bobby Davro, or whatever it is you’re calling yourself these days.) If YouTuber/musician James Marriott joined Canadian duo Death From Above 1979 for a day, it’s possible they would make something as good as ‘House of Mirrors’.
The roomy acoustic guitar on ‘Pliancy’ is a nod to ‘That’s The Way’ by a band called Led Zeppelin. The song vacillates between pleasant strums and Godspeed You Black Emperor outbursts. ‘Ruse Machine’ starts with breezy Ash-like chords and includes Rage-ing lyrics such as “As if we’d ever have the power to protest / Right now they’re working on a way to quell unrest!” Talking of Rage, the dirty bass on ‘John Doe’s Blues’ is pure Tim Commerford. After the second verse, the band create a gloriously powerful racket like Audioslave doing ‘Kashmir’.
‘Meta Song’ recalls a song “About a kid / Who lost his arm / Out of a bus.” The silliness and Spanish reference (‘fantasma miembro’ = ghost member) are not the only reasons that Mistrusted sound like Pixies here. The first thirty seconds of ‘Picaro’ could be a tape recording of a Commodore 64 game theme tune. The song then becomes Holy Bible-era Manics with a dash of Jello Biafra. Album closer ‘Lazarus Pharma’ is so frenetic, it makes System of a Down seem as urgent as Enya.
Mistrusted are fast, fun, and serious. They write songs about society and armless children. Which reminds me – the three bald men of the apocalypse on the Torres Abren Fuego album cover each have a striking resemblance to Israeli politician Yoav Gallant. Their faces are frozen in disapproval, as if tut-tutting Satan or questioning why Dean Henderson wasn’t sent off in the FA Cup final. Ah, football again – sorry, lads. Let’s get back to the music. “Torres Abren Fuego es fantástico.”
Torres Abren Fuego is out on now on Bandcamp
By: Neil Laurenson