New Track: Shaking Chains – ‘Midnight Oil/Drunk No More’

In these post-modern, fake-news, truth-plus, hyper-dissonant times Manchester’s Shaking Chains are here to salve, ease and rescue all lost souls from their corporatised socio-anxiety. With a name derived from P. Shelley’s (Percy Bysshe not Buzzcock Pete) The Masque of Anarchy, this literate quartet pronounce their arrival with gusto and panache.

Can you imagine Julian Cope channelling Jim Morrison’s gruff guttural grog grunts with Neil Hannon’s comedic divinity? You can’t? Well, you don’t need to because it’s here in aural form courtesy of Jack Mahoney’s idiosyncratic voxing expertly enunciating the uber-lyric-smithery of Nathan Mcilroy.

A-Side ‘Midnight Oil’ is the witching hour’s eternal elixir, a dusky one for the road concoction inspired by the hobo-hemian slum-antics of Midnight Cowboys’ Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck; a sting in the tale of excess with a cacophonous climax. Don’t sip, down it.

Double AA-side ‘Drunk No More’ is a superlative wonky sermon inspired by Carol Batton – Poet Laureate for Mental Health Survivors – and the thirteenth step of a twelve-step programme. The next step’s all the way to the bottom (of the bottle), after which steps cannot be retraced leaving the sozzled one “… in purgatory or is it some other place?”…  

Manchester, still so much to answer for.

‘Midnight Oil’/’Drunk No More’, the double AA-single from Shaking Chains, is out 21 April on Concrete Recordings.

Kemper Boyd
@dissapointon