Let Us Play

What’s behind the love that made fans’ eyes light up when they heard The Mae Shi were coming over from LA this January for a fresh fistful of London dates? A marriage of hardcore guitar-based intensity, electronic wizardry and a live show that sometimes borders on the ecstatic. So the bar of expectation is set pretty high for HLLLYH, album number four.

It starts with the jubilant up-and-down keyboard riff of “Lamb & Lion” planting itself firmly in your head, and we’re off. One of the first things you notice is that the album’s positively dripping with biblical language. And not just in a southern gothic borrowed-imagery way. It’s an explicitly, disarmingly religious record. Second track “PWND” (rofl) sees the band channelling God’s revealed will, and by the time the song concludes with a repeated shriek of “Get ’em out of those bodies!”, the switch from euphoric opener to dark overtones of cultish mass-murder-suicide is complete. It’s only been a few minutes, but that’s all it takes. The thrashing, whooping “Boys in the Attic” has started and I’m already hooked. It’s too late to escape if I wanted to.

The breakneck pace is kept up almost all the way through, each song pulled like a rug from under your feet before you can get settled – “7 x x 7” unfolding like a plan of attack, “Leech & Locust” a wonky, droning take on church organ and choir, “Party Politics” switching from a punky thrash into a clatter of cowbells, a vocodered voice on “Young Marks” singing “Your war is noble and divine”, single release “Run To Your Grave” a joyful chanted pinnacle…

“Kingdom Come” is the exception. It’s an eleven-and-a-half minute centrepiece dividing the album in two, morphing from a listless robot intoning “yeah yeah yeah yeah” over a techno beat to a blissful electronic daze. The mind drifts, snapping back when the keyboard motif from “Lamb & Lion” resurfaces, or trying to catch the words to a chant in the background.