Filed from the back booth of the Gutter Saints Social Club, May 30, 2025
I was three sips into a can of warm ginger beer spiked with regret when Lou Toad’s playlist Gnarl came slinking through my headphones like a noir detective with a synth problem and a lead pipe. This one ain’t just music—it’s a circuit-board séance, a rusted jukebox exorcism, a mixtape left in a motel drawer next to an empty Bible and a loaded Derringer.
Let’s tick through the transmission:
🕰️ “Ticking Away” – TV21
Kicks off like an art-school alarm clock in a Cold War hangover. Think Talking Heads if they'd been Glasgow punks with a broken metronome. Angular riffs. Neurotic bass. The kind of track that makes you late to your own funeral.
👠 “Video Queen” – Afraid of Mice
A one-hit wonder if the hit was morphine. Desperate glamour wrapped in polyester dreams. She’s not just a queen—she’s a VHS myth with chewed-up ribbon trailing behind her. This track is all eyeliner sweat and malfunctioning strobes.
🛏️ “Double Life” – The Cars
The Cars? The only band that ever made getting stood up at a drive-in feel existential. “Double Life” crawls into your headphones like a robotic lounge lizard and whispers you’re not who you think you are, pal. And it's right.
☁️ “Memories of Green” – Vangelis
A detour into tears falling on circuit boards. Blade Runner’s piano interlude for androids trying to feel. This is what ghosts listen to when they remember being human.
🔨 “Jawbreaker” (Live) – Judas Priest
The leather sermon. Halford howls and the earth shudders. This isn’t a song, it’s a fire-breathing doctrine of steel. If you don’t bleed chrome by the end of it, turn in your studs.
🧛♂️ “In League with Satan” (7” Version) – Venom
Like being baptised in bong water behind a graveyard. Proto-everything. Punk metal sludge ritual. This track walks on its knuckles and spits blood at disco balls. Pure 45 RPM necromancy.
🌬️ “Frozen Over” – Captain Beyond
The time-travel anthem of a biker who read too much Sartre. Psychedelic blues built on spiral staircases. I heard this once in a fever dream while fighting off a cold in a motel lit by blacklight.
🌊 “Let’s Go To The Sea” – Bulbous Creation
Slow acid gospel for those who still believe the ocean’s hiding a secret. Sounds like Sabbath on downers reading eco-poetry. If you’ve ever hallucinated while staring at tide charts, this one’s for you.
Verdict:
Gnarl is a stitched-together Frankenstein of post-punk synth stabs, biker doom, glam hauntings, and midnight metal. It doesn’t flow—it lunges, it shudders, it slinks, and sometimes it just waits in the fog. Lou Toad’s done it again. This is music for mutant greasers, haunted synth hackers, and dreamers too jaded to dream.
Buzz's Bottom Line:
🔥 9.5 out of 10 radio tower ghosts
💀 Plays best at 65% battery, 2AM, headphones slightly blown out
🧃 Pair with: cheap malt liquor and a philosophy zine printed on onion skin
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