With a name as aggressive and abrasive as ‘Dick Venom & the Terrortones’, comes an expectation of chaos and rawness. And, on their live album, the punk rock group deliver on this rather stereotyped but undoubtedly chaotic impression. The names of the songs are enough to set your expectations straight. The sheer unfiltered energy, baked in a freneticism and boisterous energy that has no real filter imposed on it. The melodies are unstructured in parts, but definitively pure in intention. On ‘No Good to Get Up To’, theirs even a bit of a metal energy injected. It is a full set, a set that flows from one track to the other without relenting in the slightest. You need to hear it for the right reasons, be in the mindset to accept the rowdy chaos it will surround you in, and allow yourself to take part in this undeniable celebration of rage, angst, and aggression.
Recorded by Jim Watts of The Fall, to a hostile and heroin fuelled audience, mixed by Will Wilkinson of Fritch, and mastered by Andy Wright (Rag’N’Bone Man, The Fall), these sounds are the stains of the myth that prevail.
It almost feels like a cult record, a time capsule that harkens back to a different era where this aggression and sheer energy was revered, not frowned upon. The audience that night experienced something momentous, something that was simply a singular instance that they can now relive and feel all over again. To those coming across it for the first time here, it is an entry point to the punk of yore, delivered by a messenger from today. Vent it all away on this absolute ruckus of a bombastic, eclectic, and rambunctious record.