Label: Big Scary Monsters
Released: 25th September 2020
Rating: ★★★★★
‘King of Clubs’ is as unforgiving as it gets for Jamie Lenman. Lyrically, his tongue is razor-sharp for his scathing assessments of the state of the world, and the sound which he marries with it is a fitting balance of industrial rock and his usual brand of unbridled chaos.
Opener ‘Summer Of Discontent (The Future Is Dead)’ balls up all the frustration of political disillusionment and being stuck in a broken system and releases it in a despairing scream which is echoed by Illman from Pengshui. From there it only gets more intense with the fuzzy, uncomfortable, Nine Inch Nails-esque’ Sleep Mission’ and the onslaught of violence in ‘Kill Me’ where the singer fantasies his own demise and wails “I want your fingertips to separate me cell by cell / take me a part and show me every kind of special hell”.
Anger remains at the heart of this 8 track mini-album but, typically, Lenman consistently varies his approach from brooding, instrumental, title-track to the verbal assault of “If you’re a dick when you’re drunk / you’re a dick all the fucking time” on the aggressive joyride that is ‘I Don’t Wanna Be Your Friend’.
Whether it’s huge, worldwide, frustrations or very personal annoyances (like the perception he is an “arrogant prick” in ‘Like Me Better’), Jamie Lenman has the bit between his teeth in ‘King of Clubs’. The anger is familiar from ‘Muscle Memory’, and the frustration was rife in Reuben’s album but, again, the singer freshens up his sound and further carves out his own path where he can do whatever the fuck he wants.
