Explain Yourselves LICE, You Raucous Vagabonds!

It's the track by track guide to their new double EP...

LICE aren't hanging around.

The band smash out fetid punk blaster after fetid punk blaster, awkward, squalid hunks of noise that seem to erupt in your cranium and re-wire your brain.

It's all fun and games, however, with LICE injecting everything they do with this impish, schoolboy energy. They're sat on the naughty chair, but still flicking their middle finger up to the teacher behind his back…

New double EP 'It All Worked Out Great Vol 1 and Vol 2' is out shortly – pre-order it HERE in fact – with LICE set to complete a breathless trio of UK (well, South Of England) shows this week.

So, with the band's lyrics often shrouded under layers of lovely, guttural noise, we've asked LICE to explain themselves…

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Stammering Bill
Over rolling toms peppered with blasts of industrial noise, the song is comprised of three tragicomic short stories in which a character has their life destroyed by a different neurotic obsession.

Voyeur Picture Salesman
A warping of George Formby’s ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ in which a window cleaner sells photographs he has taken on his round of unsuspecting women, leading to clashes with a distressed client and a rival photographer.

Ted’s Dead
Featuring a cornet solo from local legend Iceman Furniss (of improvised no-wave jazz collective ‘The Iceman Furniss Quartet), this song tells the story of a recent divorcee who – after being diagnosed terminally ill – murders his ex-wife in what he believes to be his final weeks alive. When he turns out to have been misdiagnosed, he is caught and sent to live out the entirety of his life in prison.

Love Your Island
One of the first songs we wrote, this song is a monologue attacking English people as governed by complacency, fear and hostility; the English are painted as an innately-destructive race of liars, resorting to cruel, cynical humour to disguise their failure to produce an authentic culture of their own.

Little John Waynes
Instrumentally, this song is a steady, swaggering send-up to The Country Teasers, culminating in a minute-long noise outro. It deals with the subject of abortions, more specifically how cases of its legalization may have made it easier for men to bully women into having them against their will; prior to this, one could consider vulnerable women who were morally against abortion as having been protected from the choice being made for them by the same state restrictions that stopped the choice being their own.

Gentleman’s Magazine
The standout favourite from ‘NUTMILK: The Basement Demos’, this jagged surf-rock song is a tribute to influential satirist Ben ‘The Rebel’ Wallers of The Country Teasers. Specifically, it deals with his satires on misogyny, which undermined misogynists by inhabiting their points of view, revealing insecurity and ignorance whilst confronting listeners with the ugliness of these attitudes. This is a satirical technique and subject which inspired a lot of the early lyrics which appear on this record.

The final section is a letter to Wallers (who has since supported us and been supported by us at many shows), while the opening line is a re-wording of a line from his song ‘Panty Shots’: ‘for a gentleman’s shiny magazine, I don’t have much need’.

In A Previous Life / Saccharine
‘It All Worked Out Great’ was originally recorded as an album in late 2016 when LICE had been together less than a year; half of the songs you hear on this record were recorded then, and the other half were recorded a year later once they’d been honed and developed. These two songs were the opening tracks, but for whatever reason are now the closing tracks; together, the songs once introduced but now surmise the record’s core theme of misanthropy.

'Saccharine' features an unstable neighbor of which everyone in town is afraid; having disappeared for two months he suddenly returns (covered in blood) and confronts his concerned neighbours as they gather on his lawn. The gibberish lines he screams at them are actually lyrics from earlier drafts of that song, as that bit wasn’t properly finished in time for the recording session, and its in-completion has always been a source of personal embarrassment.

Now, the embarrassment is gone; this minute-long burst of noise’s bizarre character, touch of viscera and confused ramblings on ‘the age of the saccharine and dull’ have all, almost two years on, ended up being the perfect way to sum up this record, and this early phase in our band.

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Catch LICE at the following shows:

May
23 Brighton The Hope And Ruin
24 Bristol Loco Klub
25 London Sebright Arms

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