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Therapy?: Cleave album review

Therapy?'s Cairns, McKeegan and Cooper live to destroy another day

By ( Classic Rock ) published
Therapy? - Redemption

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Therapy? - Cleave

Therapy? Cleave cover

1. Wreck It Like Beckett
2. Kakistocracy
3. Callow
4. Expelled
5. Success? Success Is Survival
6. Save Me From The Ordinary
7. Crutch
8. I Stand Alone
9. Dumbdown
10. No Sunshine

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It sure gladdens the heart to hear Therapy? cranking up the amps and spitting out defiance once again. 

Cleave is their fifteenth studio album, but Andy Cairns and co. sound no less angry, no less ready to dissect and dissemble the misanthropic side of humanity, to find solace in community, in togetherness. Bruising, melodic, rigorous; music for murky imaginings. 

Wreck It Like Beckett powers out a message of positive nihilism; first single Callow ricochets hope among the turbulence; Save Me From The Ordinary cranks up the metallic KO and melodic frustration. Drums thunder and crash, guitar bites insurrection. 

On Cleave, 10 tracks come together to roar out yet one more fuck you to a mendacious and disjointed outer world, a carnival of bloated animals. 

‘No sunshine’ howls Cairns on the final track, but there is always hope where Therapy? are concerned, always another way of being

Everett True
Everett True

Everett True started life as The Legend!, publishing the fanzine of that name and contributing to NME. Subsequently he wrote for some years for Melody Maker, for whom he wrote seminal pieces about Nirvana and others. He was the co-founder with photographer Steve Gullick of Careless Talk Costs Lives, a deliberately short-lived publication designed to be the antidote to the established UK music magazines.