The Destroyers – Out Of Babel (Destruction Records)

No one likes to feel like they’re being sold something. Goitres, BO, casual racism and an evangelical passion for civil war re-enactment. All of these finished lower than a clipboard and a cheeky grin in a recent poll of antisocial personal features that I just made up in my head. The Destroyers at first glance might seem to be a 15-strong klezmer and gypsy inspired party band, but at heart they’re a sales outfit. They’ve got a myth, a cultural time-share that they KNOW you’re gonna wanna get a piece of before it’s everywhere and they’re going to shove it down your throat until you buy it or run screaming from the high-pressure seminar swearing that you’ll never read another glossy pamphlet again.

The first words on the album, growled out over a mock-spooky alco-pop as soundtrack are “From the glass coffin of genre, a startling new song breaks out…” But it doesn’t. What does break out is the most perfect reconstruction of my recollection of Glastonbury circa 1995. Mud, mazurkas and cod-counter culture knee-jerk bollocks. Again they stick telling me what their music is (Side note: Hockey, what you’re singing is SHIT music). “A jazzy, funky fable,” they insist. OK, if you’re sure. Do you take Amex?

All this is a great shame. The playing from a Cecil B. DeMille scaled cast instrumentalists is spot on, and the style has a Bellowhead energy set to a Gogol Bordello gypsy-punk beat. Great live for certain, but with the cold, hard light of iTunes the cheesy self-publicising lyrics put too much of strain on the taste-buds for repeated sober listening.

They dress like a legion of Papa Lazarous. They’ve bought their own myth and want to march into town like a terrifying circus, smash taboos and sleep with your daughters, then leave in the morning while the fug is still thick in your heads. The reality is more like a Tesco Value ghost train. Ah well. Give me a gallon of scrumpy and 14 years of my life back and I’ll love them.

Stephen Taylor