MONUMENT review by Pig Hill magazine - April 2025

Out of breath, you close the basement door firmly, lock all the bolts around it and slump down onto the floor panting and sweating. But it’s no use. You can hear it advancing along the hall and down the steps. It’s coming after you. It’s going toget you. It’s going to wrap its groovy tentacles around your body. It’s going to plug into your bloodstream. And it’s going to infect you with its sinister beats and catchy grooves. What is this beast? It’s the new Shriekback album and it’s just been released from its manacles.

In a 2025 post Covid world of fear and alienation this 18th studio Shriekback album arrives just in time. In a climate of mistrust, fake news and AI images we are all in need of some escapism and self pleasure. The gloriously dark and funky Shriekback are back to offer us an escape portal into a world of non-stop EXOTIC cabaret and beckon us into their circus tent with a wagging black leather-gloved finger.

Opening track The Curse’s intro literally sounds like a Stranger Things-style slime is squeezing through that bolted cellar door to re-morph and grab you by the throat. As the lyrics confirm: You can’t reason with it / and it won’t go away. Its stomp-boom hypnotic percussion continues relentlessly until you are cornered but fortunately, when you open your terrified eyes to face it, you find it grinning at you and wanting to dance to a Norman Watt-Roy bass riff borrowed from Ian Dury & The Blockheads’ Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick.

Quetzalcoatl also drops in to gurgle and whisper into your ear. Probably something like: ‘Get yr skinny ass on the dance floor my friend!’

Veteran eighties goth funk high priest Barry Andrews has of course been doing this kind of thing for over four decades now. This year actually marks the 40th anniversary of their Oil And Gold album and its cult indie hit Nemesis: a high watermark anthem of post-punk funk. In the interim, genres and cults have gone in and out of fashion, natch, but the time appears perfect again for a revival. Sisters Of Mercy, Killing Joke and Clan Of Xymox are already checking the screenwash levels on the tourbus.

Mr Andrews, ever the witty wordsmith - it was he who joyously got the word ‘parthenogenesis’ into the chorus of an underground pop hit after all - does not disappoint; with a visceral lexicon throughout the entire album positively dripping in grandeur, dark humour and nuisance-making, with sleazy phrases tossed aside for fun such as: polymorphously perverse, misanthropic jollies, impenetrable confabulation, our disposition is saturnine, the perma-crisis, my withered stump of a life, a craven little half-baked shitter, bring the pandemonium! the ataraxia! the eupraxia! the windowlickers are go!

As the first track makes way for an insanely early squelchy synth solo you know Barry isn’t going to waste time keeping us on tenterhooks for the money shot. The time is now doodz and we need to get on with having a good time. The anthemic opener winds up far too quickly in my opinion, albeit in unexpected luxury with the glorious backing vocal chant inspired by W. E. Henley’s Invictus:

Strait the gate and narrow is the way / black as night from pole to pole / proud and loud and bloody and unbowed / and I’m the captain of my soul

When you open an album with a piece as rousing as this you do wonder where it’s going to go next. But remember this is Shriekback you poor fools. We have only just begun a journey of extreme highs. 

Ithaka has the unenviable job of following it. Another literary reference, this time to Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, it provides a stark counterbalance with its gloomy existential crisis acceptance of the pointlessness of life at the end a pilgrimage to, well, where exactly?

This Shriekback album was written and performed by Andrews without his usual cohorts Martyn Barker and Carl Marsh. But as Barry himself once said to me in an interview a few years ago, it doesn’t matter who is involved. Shriekback is a vehicle that kind of drives itself. You just get in and become it. You don’t mess with it. Indeed on Plumed! Barry demands clearly ‘bring me my special hat!’ And it's exactly this. He puts the Shriekback hat on and he becomes Shriekback. 

Thankfully he is again able to hook up with brilliant vocalists Wendy and Sarah Partridge (of Electric Guitars) and Kat Evans on violin who are all equally versed in the Shrieky P.O.V.

The phrase ‘nobody said there would be Wasps In Heaven’ reminds me of one of those random sentences your English Lit. teacher would give the class to examine and make inferences from. Barry turns it into a very funny critique of the afterlife. Basically when you get there you find out it’s full of a bunch of twats you spent most of your actual life trying to avoid. I think I’ve worked out the metaphor and all the right wing Republican characters you didn’t want to meet up with are there. Including presumably the White Anglo Saxon Protestants, the MAGAs and the RINOs. We’re mopping down the lino!

At the mid point of this piece comes a mic drop moment which literally has me squealing with inner joy: 
the angels choirs are singing / but there’s quite a lot of stinging.

Plumed! Is possibly intended as a narcissistic look at the modern world - gazing at my gorgeous self, editing selfies, putting my face through a filter and falling in love with my own image. But Uncle Barry has a positive message for the Gen Zee kidz:

Keep your shit wired tight all you children of the night / It will all be alright when you’re plumed 

The brilliantly titled and Gokart Mozart-sounding Idiot Dancing makes use of a 4-to-the-floor tacky disco beat you might find on one of those Casio MT100 keyboards from 1980. It also sneaks in a cheeky nod to The Bangles’ Walk Like An Egyptian drum machine lightning cracks effect: it finds Barry longing to escape this fucked-up world and he reminisces about throwing unusual shapes on the dancefloor to hyper trendy made-up routines. 

It feels like a nod to Patti Smith’s Land Of A Thousand Dances 1975 mash-up on Horses. But I’d prefer to be at one of Barry’s parties where together we could Crank The Handle, Sink The Bismarck and do The Phantom Limb! 

Monument takes place very much in the now and at various points our Baz is ‘shouting at the algorithm’, having LOLS, and admitting it’s all my bad. Burn Book briefly takes us into bluesy organ The The territory from their 1986 Infected album. The devil gets his freak on and we might be about to become Matt Johnson’s 51st state of the USA.

Closing track Monument feels like an epitaph. A final cry of hope maybe but an underlying regret or acceptance of a short attention-spanned world that won’t remember the genius of Barry Andrews. I wanna soar in the Pleiades! Barry dreams. [But I’ll probably be] buried under Nil Town [or you can] just chuck me in the skip!

Barry daydreams of being remembered like one of the Greek philosophers and having his words analysed - or in his case his music and lyrics analysed - but of course he is far too modest really and his self-deprecation kicks in, after all [he’s] just a filthy little poisoned goblin with a ball-gag on.

There is another final poetic reference, this time to Shelley’s Ozymandius: Ozymandius and us / all end up under the bus!

and Ozymandius, I project / will just get colossally wrecked! colossally wrecked! colossally wrecked!

The refrain repeats, a wordplay on the original ‘decay of that colossal wreck’. It’s an effective ending. But just when you think this opus is about to reach a sensuous climax Mr Andrews surprises us again - it suddenly grinds to a halt. As if the cable has been ripped out on the life support machine. That’s it. The end.

Is Barry hinting that this is the final Shriekback album? If it is it would be a grand ending, such is the greatness of this piece of work. It’s arguably their best ever. But for obvious reasons we all certainly hope not.

A final thought: Is Barry Andrews Shriekback? Or is Shriekback Barry Andrews? The more I think about it the further away I get. Maybe we’ll never find out.

Rog Clinton-Herman