Terminal Cheesecake operate at a crazed pitch not dissimilar to Butthole Surfers, albeit by varying means, in that an underlying mischievousness underscores everything they produce. And if Le Sacre Du Liévre takes yet another twist in a career full of them, one thing it retains is that sense of fee spirited waywardness.
From their formation in 1988, Terminal Cheesecake blazed a swampy trail through the UK’s underground until they ceased activity in 1995. Having returned into the fold in 2013, the band committed their first new material in 22 years to wax in 2016 with the excellent Dandelion Sauce of the Ancients via Newcastle’s Box Records.
Happily, their reformation continues with this latest collection of ungovernable noise.
If Saddle Shower sounds like it was cooked up in a raging furnace, its plodding pace lending the track a very particular kind of menace, South Sea Wall creeps in at a quieter, softer canter with vocal loops, eerie guitars, and an ominous twinkle of a triangle here and there. Rest assured, it’s no less intimidating for it.
Le Sacre Du Liévre covers a lot of ground with little truck for whether the listener can keep up, but it’s worth trying. What the classic Terminal Cheesecake cut Wipey’s Revenge proves via its punishing stomp and trippy, echo-laden vocal is that they’re always threatening to fuck you up, one way or another.
Elsewhere, Golden Hare bish, bash boshes its way into your skull and Bull In The Woods goes full-on batshit with a cacophonous row that you can but marvel at. This snatch of rabid psych is how the recent It film might have been soundtracked if it were truly x-rated and utterly psychotic, and not a Stranger Things rehash. Then there’s V.D.K. Neck (1), a no-holds-barred banger of gloriously twisted proportions. Party time à la Terminal Cheesecake evidently sounds like revelry at the end of days, and is subsequently all the deranged fun you could want for in a neat under-five-minute package.
As one of the great UK cult bands, Terminal Cheesecake has produced another fine addition to their mad oeuvre. Long may they reign as lords of weird shit.