London band David Cronenberg’s Wife, a grimy stew of Eighties indie and folk trimmings, deal in the abject; shame, sadness and lust gone rotten. Their new album, for instance, contains a song called “Mermaid’s Tale” wherein the first-person narrator, a morose divorcee, comes across a gorgeous mermaid while sailing near the Greek island of Hydra. She needs him for sex, but things soon turn grubby, forlorn and prosaic. Also funny, in a twisted way.
There’s a storied tradition of abjection in the arts, from Iain Banks’ Wasp Factory to Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop” to the paintings of Francis Bacon. It’s not currently fashionable, though. A swathe of the young, especially, do not want to be shocked or creeped out. Trigger warnings are in place to prevent accidental stumbles into that which might shock (and, of course, warn those genuinely traumatized).
David Cronenberg’s Wife, on the other hand, revel in this territory. Their last album, 2020’s The Ship (Necrologies), is morbidly death-centric and the one before that, 2012’s Don’t Wait to Be Hunted to Hide, is as determinedly grim as it is gripping and literate, a catalogue of grotesque vignettes about drink-spikers, paedos and rapists. It seems unlikely it would be made now.
Department of Biology, their fifth album, does not plumb such depths, but itchy menace seeps through many of its songs. Singer Tom Mayne’s nasal, drily theatrical voice is a suitable vehicle too, on the likes of “Lot’s Daughters”, the Old Testament story, replete with incest and God-wrought blindings, rendered as a pub-told yarn, or the gloomy missing girlfriend spoken word of “Where is She?”. Even jollier cuts, such as the warped culinary advice of “Mark’s Eight Tastes”, end in repugnance.
The band rev up a galloping Balkan punk romp for “Chekhov’s Bordello” and a drum machine propels the enigmatic sex’n’sorrow ponderings of “The Sea”, but listeners will come to these twitchy narrative songs for their overall effect. The album closes with the twinkling tuneful indie of the poignantly existential “If You Think About It”, an increasingly desperate rumination on age, the past and life disappearing.
In these troubled times we tend to turn away from the darkness. David Cronenberg’s Wife do not. They find poetry in mire, unhappiness and unpleasantness, creating studied wordage and music to match. They are a one-off and should be valued as such.
Below: watch the video for "Chekhov's Bordello" by David Cronenberg's Wife
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