4/5 stars
What’s in a name? A hell of a lot if your name is as awesome as Joanna Gruesome’s. Of course, there’s a lot more to this Welsh quintet than a love of puns – their debut LP is a Frankenstein concoction of noisy lo-fi garage-dwelling femme-punk (think Perfect Pussy and Bikini Kill) and warm, twee indie-pop (think Camera Obscura and Los Campesinos!).
The tracks either furiously smash-cut between the two stylistic approaches or run them concurrently in a blaze of flurrying drums and dual vocals. That’s a lot to take in purely on its own – now imagine the whole thing flying by in about 20 minutes. Peanut Butter is one of the year’s biggest surprise packages for taking the aforementioned elements – which, admittedly, seem more than a little crazy on paper – and creating something substantial, smart and savage. After bolting out of the gates with ‘Last Year’, the band flies through nine more buzzsaw-pop hybrids that are nothing short of stunning in their contrasts and deceptive simplicity.
The band’s namesake once sang about ‘The Book Of Right-On’. With Peanut Butter, Joanna Gruesome have written a chapter all of their own. For lack of a better term, it’s bloody delightful.
