This isn't a hologram dancing, marionette corpse, tap-dancing nostalgia trip. It’s a jagged pill, a necessary taser jolt. Jowe Head-- one of the sole surviving architects of the original Solihull Syndicate -- just dropped a record handling legacy like a hot, glowing BTU ember.
An organ grinder’s monkey's comeback? Completely antithetical to reality, this is a well-orchestrated calculation of intelligent chaos. This is an aural flaying of the past. Half-century-old skeletal sketches and rotting, hydrolyzed bedroom tapes are dragged into the burning moth light, finally fleshed out by a certified rogue’s gallery of post-punk partisans—Haines, Callahan, McFadden. The missing Godfrey brothers, Nikki Sudden and Epic Soundtracks, leave a massive, echoing crater. There is no replacing them. Yet, C21 bridges the brutal gap between the 1980s’ bitter freeze and 2026’s frenetic frequencies without rapid eye blinking. It strips the skin right off your expectations layer by layer.
"A Morning Star." Instant, blistering, bubbling bliss. Razor-wire riffs and volatile vocal hooks make you realize modern "indie" is just decaf corporate flower velour wallpaper. A calculated, clever clatter. A meticulous, melodic mess. They take Epic’s old piano ghost, "Jelly Babies," peeling back the decades to re-carve it into a moving, monumental alabaster monument. No sterile studio polish here. A beating, pulsating, throbbing constant heart.
Look at that jacket -- the "Vertical Take-Off and Landing" collage work. Stark, beautiful, art-brut perfection smuggled straight out of a 1979 squat. They didn't outsource this to a faceless factory fodder line. The entire run was hand-pulled, hand-stamped, and manually manufactured by an independent, radical women's screenprinting cooperative down in Valencia, Spain.
You can literally feel the ink ridges on the heavy cardstock like fresh scabs. Tactile, turbulent, beautifully flayed and flawed. No two covers are identical—clotted ink. A deliberate, defiant rejection of mass production. Pull the wax out. Complete ever-spinning roulette. Bruised Purple, toxic Red, or deep-trench Black.
Drastic, dramatic drops. One minute a short, sharp shock to the skull, the next drowning in a repetitive, droning kraut-rock abyss. "Serious fun." Irreverent. Inexplicable. Insidious.
Most of the class of '77 are either dead or on nostalgia cruises. This lot? Still deliberately puzzling the public and fracturing the formula. Go buy the vinyl before the record store sharks mark it up to overbloated, Discogs-unattainable cash grabs.
