The Power and The Glory

Anyone got the number for a good small claims lawyer? My laptop’s completely ruined from water damage, I’m soaked to the bone and on the brink of hypothermia, I’ve developed intense agoraphobia and am afraid to step outside my house, and it’s all Perc’s fault.

What’s more, I’d wager I’m not the only such victim out there. For, as I type this, I’m huddled up in a foetal position in the shower, blasts of purging cold water crashing down on my bowed head as the sound of ‘Rotting Sound’, the opening track to London-based Ali Wells’ second full-length The Power & The Glory, drills its brutally unforgiving burden of paranoid terror in to my all-too-human brain tissue. Think you’d fare any better upon plugging Perc’s monolithic dystopian nightmare into your unsuspecting ears? No, you’re wrong.

Even if you manage to navigate the first track without dropping to your knees and raising your despairing palms towards a clearly merciless god, by the time album closer ‘A Living End’ breathes its last, fretful breath, there’ll be a part of your soul that will forever be a dense layer of black – the colour of Nina Simone’s true love’s hair – but don’t worry, because after this you won’t be experiencing true love any time soon.

Most troubling is that, while in any normal circumstances no sentient being would subject themselves to such torment, it’s nigh-on impossible to tear yourself away. Perc guides us through a bitterly clinical factory, where they presumably specialise in crushing hopes and dreams on an industrial scale, and the resulting record is a brilliant example of techno at its most captivatingly brutal. Now someone please pass me a towel, and Perc, I’ll see you in court.