Album Review: The Blinders - Fantasies Of A Stay At Home Psychopath
Something wicked this way comes – so says the opening track of the sophomore album from The Blinders: and my, how right they are. Fantasies of a Stay At Home Psychopath is a blindingly brilliant record, an intense, dystopic, claustrophobic blast from start to finish that catapults the Doncaster alt-rockers to new heights.
Fantasies is very much an album of two halves - two sets of five songs separated by an interlude. It opens with the aforementioned ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes,’ a mean, swaggering, anti-Capitalist track that calls to mind the work of Marilyn Manson at his provocative best. Thomas Haywood’s distorted vocals combine with Charlie McGough’s hypnotic bass riffs and Matthew Neale’s excellent drum beats serve to carry you along in an almost trance-like state, completely swept up in the track’s atmosphere before it transitions into ‘Forty Days and Forty Nights,’ a more thrashy and confident song that somehow feels dirty in the best possible way.
‘Lunatic With a Loaded Gun’ takes a very specific, all-but-explicit aim at Donald Trump in its lyrics, and is ferocious enough to feel almost riot-inducing. They then slow things down with ‘Circle Song’, a track that perfectly captures the endless and aimless wandering that we all know too well currently. It’s a welcome change of pace for the record, allowing us to relax somewhat and take stock of things while enjoying Haywood’s excellent guitar solos. The album’s first half concludes with ‘I Want Gold,’ another slow track with less meditation but more swagger, to the extent that it’d feel right at home in a Western movie.
After the intensity of the interlude that feels like it belongs in a film like American Psycho, the album’s second half follows a similar flow to the first; ‘Mule Track’ carries a similar attitude and anger to that of earlier tracks, with all that emotion turned at once inward and outward, questioning one’s place in a world gone insane. ‘If Hell is below, then what is this?’ questions Haywood – and who can blame him? ‘Rage at the Dying of the Light’ echoes the Dylan Thomas poem Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, though the action it encourages is more open here than in that poem.
‘Black Glass’ is the album’s penultimate track – a six-minute epic that continues the tone of earlier tracks while adding more angst, heavier guitars and drum riffs, to excellent, foot-tapping effect. Fantasies wraps up with the, frankly, beautiful ‘In This Decade,’ an entirely acoustic track that laments the pain that comes with lost love. Haywood’s vocals here feel earnest and raw enough to bring tears to your eyes, and the song closes the album on a sombre, emotional note.
Not that that’s a bad thing, of course: no amount of sadness could prevent Fantasies of a Stay At Home Psychopath from being one of the best releases of the year so far. It is mean, energetic, political and emotional, it’s an essential record that beautifully reflects the current state of the world.
Words: Matt Taylor