There’s always been a subtly ambitious reach behind Uranium Club’s scrappy midwestern-style punk. Across their seven-year output, a janky garage belies their effortlessly virtuoso musician chops and the tight, elastic interplay between members Brendan Wells, Harry Wohl, Ian Stemper, and Matt Stagner, all forming the band in Minneapolis in 2013. Allegedly orchestrating the impressive cover for their new full length involving hundreds of extras arranged in a 120ft wide spiral and shot with drones, the group’s sly vision hasn’t dimmed since 2019’s The Cosmo Cleaners.
Latest LP Infants Under The Bulb, out on London’s Static Shock Records and Australia’s Anti Fade with a lengthy tour of Aus to follow across March, takes Television’s complex and progressive compositions and gleefully twists, snaps, and crumples such hefty arrangements into disjointed garage rock teeming with upside-down, buoyant hooks. This infectious tangle of knotted post-punk scores a tricksome thematic obsession with history’s curios and mysteries, inexplicable figures and footnotes of the more paranoid end of popular consciousness such as Jean-Dominique Bauby, Jeremiah Denton, or All My Children‘s Peter Bergman.
‘Small Grey Man’ intriguingly opens the album, a dramatic slow burner bristling with climactic guitar licks and IE’s Mariel Oliveira’s horn blasts establish a confounding foreboding atypical to the rest of the record’s more cluttered jocularity. Stirring cowpunk is wrestled out of the band’s dextrous grab-bag on the cinematic ‘Tokyo Paris L.A. Milan’, recalling Aus labelmates’ The Toads‘ knack for crafting evocative vignettes, and jerky garage strut smacks with all the attitude and energy of Wipers at their most effortlessly infectious. The penultimate crescendo of ‘Big Guitar Jack Off In The Sky’ is the grand centrepiece that expertly realises Uranium Club’s characteristic strive hiding in the snark, a whirlwind near-instrumental of driving riffage and exquisite piano that’s exhilaratingly propulsive and arguably the LP’s finest moment.
Uranium Club’s penchant for disorganised lyrical drizzle peppers their jerky post-punk with distinctive verbal disarray, vocal duties never shared between Wells, Wohl and Stemper but fought over, interrupted upon, with concurrent delivery like the feverish chatter between multiple village eccentrics. Skewed narratives and dialogue also feature prominently on Infants Under The Bulb. A parallel sub-plot involving a sentient wall and its effects on two towns serve as welcome interludes amidst the jumbled punk attack, and a step into fourth-wall destroying surrealism on the dadaist ‘Abandoned By The Narrator’ slathers any misconstrued earnestness from ‘The Wall’ segments with gleeful dollops of irreverent, narrative deception.
Five years have done nothing to dim Uranium Club’s breathlessly misshapen energy. A glorious churn of entangled garage rock, oblique lyrical intrigue and incongruous drama, Infants Under The Sun presents like a post-punk Magic Eye stereogram, rewarding each listen and deeper immersion with strange, new clarities and answers.