Sometimes, reviewing an album is like trying to nail jelly to a wall, it’s so hard to describe what’s going on, but presumably this will please the band in question immensely, as if this is what they set out to do, to baffle and confuse, then mission well and truly accomplished.
UNIVERSITY, are a Crewe-based band of noiseniks and McCartney, It’ll Be OK, (reportedly a misheard lyric from one of its songs, still a Beatles-related reference) is their long awaited debut album following 2023’s Title Track EP and a handful of singles since then.
I first became aware of them upon hearing their debut single back in 2022 ‘Can’t Breathe’, which sounded like run of the mill, kids playing at being Blink/Limp/Linkin, before seeing them live, which was quite the guttural shock to the system as it couldn’t have been any more removed from the record, their 30 minute set felt like just one solid uninterrupted piece of music, a noise filled, unhinged mess (but in a good way), which left the crowd open mouthed and this record has the same feels to it, especially as it was recorded live as it seemingly had to be, in order to fully catch the essence of University.
It starts with the marvellously entitled ‘Massive Twenty One Pilots Tattoo’, (they’ve a penchant for the absurd title, this one is named after the answer to a game of “what would be the worst tattoo in the world?”), beginning with a garbled phone message and a lounge interlude, before it sounds like the band fall down some stairs and then its straight-into-the-business-of-noise time. The rest of the record sounds like they’ve left the gas on and they just want to rush through things and get off, there’s a constant feeling that it could collapse at any minute, it threatens to go off on tangents, but no idea where.
Everything is twice as quick and as loud as you would expect and it makes for a glorious holy mess, with songs stopping and starting at will, recent single ‘Curwen’ is as commercial as it gets, it’s as musical as the first half of ‘Hustler’s Metamorphosis’ which in this context of the piece is almost pop, threatening to break into noodly emo at any point.
It’s a BIG-sounding record and the hugest stand out is the ten-minute monster that is ‘History of Iron Maiden pt.1’ ,which rattles along at a ferocious pace before imploding in on itself. It’s almost namesake (except it’s only ‘pt 0.5’) ends with a keyboard laden computer game styled bleepy instrumental outro, which befits there ‘god knows what comes next’ ethos.
You wonder how the album has turned out as a comprehensible set of songs as it has, as it seems to have no through thread, nothing holding it together, they’ve just recorded it from the heart and sent it out into the world. You wouldn’t sit down with a cup of tea on a Sunday night to listen to it, it will take on a multilayer extra seen in the live arena, but it is quite the introduction to their world.
