Absolutely TYPICAL that our long-gestating Businesslunch! comp should materialise at a time when everyone’s business, and lunch, is under unforeseen threat…

Savage titular irony aside, this all-you-can-eat international buffet / meat-raffle / disasterpiece - which actually came together late last year – feels eerily OF THE NOW. Its contributors - Slender, Mosquitoes, The Lloyd Pack, Thistle Group, Speedbooth, Suburban Cracked Collective, Noor, Genghis Cohn, Michael Speers, Ashtray Navigations – seem somehow to have fully anticipated the conditions of solitude, paranoia and penury that as of recently define our everyday reality, and supply us here with twelve tunes that effortlessly map the maniac contours of our proper CROCKED sense of space and time and existence. Guess some dogs were just born ready...

So let’s treat Businesslunch! as the front-line report on the current wave of global fukery it was obviously destined, if not intended, to be. Even at the best of times, Mosquitoes make music that inducer fever and cramping chest-pains, and their ‘Mescal (Michaux Dub)’ duly ups the ante (medic!!!); Ashtray Navigations’s battered brainticket ‘Console To Console’ sutures abstract downer tekno to bloozy guitar galaxy-tremble as only they can, or dare, and Polonius trippps hard into hazy, ethereal thickets, and breaks into a sorta fourth-world version of 'We Will Rock You', before stumbling into a pit of delay-clay as claggy n condensed as last week’s hummus – it’s alive! Bunkered Oz bonce-burners Suburban Cracked Collective fire over a heavenly triptych of devilish design, its sedative, desert-dried melodies swelling to a blazing-sky climax of strafing synths and percussive pain-engine rattle… Those Slender lads fail to cover The La’s but provide their own vision of skeletal, streetwalkin’, people-in-my-town-are-full-of-shite psychedelia in ‘There She Goes Again’, as well as a second helping of primordial, bombed-out biker-bar mutation, tighty muzzled and buried nose-first ‘In Pure Soil’, all delivered with the energy and frustrated VENOM of a sack o’ young snakes!

Michael Speers is keeping busy too, seemingly recording himself flushing Darkthrone down the shitter whilst also somehow making us hyper-attuned to the invisible activity of the complex concrete-entombed cabling and surgical electricals that surround us at any/every given moment….! The sleep-starved, rhetorical minimalism of Noor’s 'First Night' takes on a life of its own, as her equipment BEGS for a puff on an inhaler and winds up somewhere between sombre-sailing decompression-session and full-on shut-in, my-cat-is-the-antichrist psychosis. If this was how she was feeling on the FIRST NIGHT, where’s her head at now?! The Lloyd Pack a punch (eh) with queasy one-chord death-croon ‘I Won’t Hit Easter’, evoking a temporarily(?) vanished world of artisanal FROTH in this tale of flat-white-boyfriends and “not going back to Maxwell House” (oh yes you are!). Once local-lass Thistle Group scrawls a weather-wrinkled postcard from her mobile iso unit, loosely binding a bittersweet garage-pop-kiss-off to brutish unruly Jandekian power-chord dirge, and from a stew of shopping centre concrete/concrète Genghis Cohn gently implores his gurl not to join the army but shoot him instead. And it's reliably cloistered Spillage Fete operative Speedbooth who gracefully lowers the curtain with a creaking, claustrophobic Lothian free-folk limerick – ruthlessly concise but managing to discharge a melancholy as endless and thickly clotted as this ere lockdown is starting to feel… THE END

**Ltd CD edition of 70 also available**