"Welcome
To The Monkey House" (Album, 2024)
Grow Your Own Records
This has been out a while, but has recently been given a vinyl release, hence the slightly tardy review. Although they’ve been going for over a decade, I’m a recent (zealous) convert* to ZMG's particular brand of sickness. As the name suggests, there a ghoulish humour running through these songs, and they could reasonably be described as mainly being influenced by The Cramps and Dead Kennedys** (when both bands were in their respective pomps) in roughly equal measure – although lyrically it's Jello & Co. that hold the upper hand on this release, which is easily their best so far.
The quality is so high, there really aren't any bad songs on this, just some that are slightly better than the baseline of excellence. It opens with a salvo of belters; The 1984 referencing They Want us Dead ("The rooms are bugged, Our accounts been hacked"), the paranoid Stay Low ("To hell with the needy, Abandon the lame"), the title track*** ("Milk the teat of human misery"), and the self-explanatory Stupid ("I don’t need no facts and figures, I don’t need no information, Blind faith and ignorance will get me through this conversation").
Dance of the Dead ("Cradle to the grave with a stumble and a trip, Pushed down by the Pavlovian slip"), Dead Man Walking ("I want you baby, but only for your brain"), bring up the rear with a more EC comics vibe, and are all the better for it.
The packaging is, as with all Grow Your Own
releases, really good, and includes a lyric booklet (and a
poster with the vinyl).
*I hope they get huge, and they deserve to be, but I worry
that they will attract that most depressing and pathetic of
sub-subcultures – Psychobillies.
**"When people say we sound like Dead Kennedys, we say;
‘Yeah.’"
*** Although the pedant in me finds the 'Monkey House' a bad
metaphor (monkeys would create chaos because they aren't
able to do anything else; what the Government has done is
coldly deliberate), musically and lyrically, it's the
stand-out track on the album: "Pour yourself a triple
measure, Crack open another case of pain, Smear yourself
in wanton pleasure, We're the only winners in this game,
Smother those below with pressure, Stuff their mouths with
rags you soaked in blame". 8/10
Nick Hydra (January 2025)
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