Six blokes who survived the Mark E. Smith sausage-squeezing meat grinder, plus a beautiful Blue Orchid for good measure. But if you’re turning up to Inklings expecting some pathetic karaoke penny on the eyes wake, you’re completely barking up the wrong great Deku tree. Not a tribute act. It’s a cash-in-hand inheritance from a filthy-rich uncle… let's call him Uncle Martin. Four records in four years is a terrifyingly prolific storm burst clip. Still, this time they’ve finally stopped just busking in the dark and rehearsed before totally relying on spontaneous combustive improvisation.
The result? A total, unrelenting, judicious, justifiable. juggernaut.
The immediate standout is "Wrecked." Got that classic, state-of-the-nation fist-swinging swagger we've all been starved of, driving hard on a razor-sharp razorblade riff while Martin Bramah spits pure virulent venom about scoundrels and scurvy fellows. He’s lecturing from a lectern like a madman possessed. vicar drunk on prose and passage, dropping bits of Macbeth and Goethe's High-falutin' on paper, maybe, but in practice? Proper aural brutality.
Then you get "Ours Is The Fall." Let’s not mince beefy words about that title. It’s a relentless, apocalyptic moon stomp, buried under a wall of dual-drum chaos where Bramah screams "Come on, you cowards" into the wind tunnel void. Heavy, noisy, and it feels like the ghost of Manchester's premier curmudgeon is finally being acknowledged—then promptly shoved down the stairs, only to later become a Netflix true crime documentary.
Steve Hanley’s bass is, as always, the concrete foundation holding the whole messy Papal Cathedral together. Especially on "My Throbbing Heart," which crawls along on a groove so filthy it’s an absolute blinding tin up in hand bit of work. Behind him, Paul Hanley and Simon Wolstencroft lock the double-drums into a hypnotic, Krautrock-adjacent groove that gives the Butthole Surfers in their prime a pork cut two drummer ambush an aural colonoscopy with no anthesia.
Would hope they would storm the polluted beaches of North America. No cheap nostalgia tricks, no messing about, no encores. Just seven geezers who helped build the fabled blueprint, tearing it up piece by piece on their own terms. Inklings is proof that the DNA survives. Get tested.
