Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats return. Nearly two decades on from the demo Kevin Starrs hammered together in a Cambridge garage, the tunes have never once dulled in menace. Shapes of Midnight is the most furious, sharply aimed record of their career, a horror band swinging the lens off the crypt and onto the world outside the window.
UNCLE ACID AND THE DEADBEATS
Shapes of Midnight is, before anything else, a record about right now. Starrs has described starting from one image: a mansion on the hill, the rich sealed inside while a hellscape churns through the village below, before realising he had accidentally rewritten Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, that 1842 tale of Prince Prospero walling his nobles into an abbey while plague works through the poor outside. Nearly two centuries on, the fit is uncanny, and the band presses on the bruise. It’s their most openly political work: a snarl about the wealth gap and environmental ruin, dressed in the usual candlelight but heavier and more guitar-driven than they have sounded in years.
The production backs the anger up. Cut at Abbey Road, straight to analogue tape across a breathless three days with engineer Chris Bolster on the studio’s storied EMI desks, through the same 1950s Neumann microphones the Beatles and Pink Floyd once sang into, then mastered by Noel Summerville, it ditches the murky reverb of old for something sharp, close and immediate. And Rachel Burnett, carried over from the Nell’ Ora Blu touring band, brings keyboards and saxophone that hand the group colours they have never really had before.
SHAPES OF MIDNIGHT
A good horror opens with a jolt, and Shapes of Midnight knows it. Starrs has singled out House by the Grave as one of his favourite things the band have ever done and the ideal way in, and the reasoning is instant. The riff lunges like something out of Psycho, the Alice Cooper group and Master of Reality Sabbath colliding in a heap of drive and dread, and that gloriously daft, gloriously perfect cry of “Yonder stands the sinner!” The flag is planted inside two minutes unmistakably, gleefully theirs.
The title track is the clearest statement of intent, showing how much of this music runs on pure atmosphere. Organ pours in beneath a riff that skips where you brace for a stomp, Starr’s guitar turning strange and weightless as the rhythm section grinds below. “The fog deceives your eyes,” he sings, and the mood cinches like a wet knot, bleak to the bone, yet you will be humming it for days.
WHEN EVIL WAKES
When Evil Wakes hands the keyboards the wheel, its Farfisa churn calling up the spirits of The Doors and Iron Butterfly. Menace pools in the corners while solos flare off in every direction, and the thing simply glides, each idea dissolving into the next with the telepathy of a band that has clocked real hours together. Seductive psych-horror, pure and simple.
Then it lunges. Don’t Let It Control You, pushed out ahead of the pack as an early single, is the record’s sharpest jolt of adrenaline, all finger-snap momentum and forward tilt until you’re half out of your chair. This is Uncle Acid at their most perversely hummable: a pop song wearing a death mask, the catchier for the disguise.
Psycho on the Loose is precisely the romp its title promises, and one of the album’s most gleeful side-streets. Burnett’s vintage-’80s analogue synths do the heavy lifting, smearing neon-lit unease across a stalk-and-slash groove with no right to be this much fun.
I WON’T SLEEP
The saxophone finally strides into the light on I Won’t Sleep (’til You’re Gone). And what a moment it makes. A Thin Lizzy-shaped sax hook muscles to the front of a song already thick with them, and the payoff is one of the record’s flat-out highlights: sleazy, swaggering, impossible to shake. If one track here wins over the doubters, it’s this.
The Other Side of the Sky is the instrumental centrepiece. It is proof that the widescreen reach of Nell’ Ora Blu wasn’t dropped so much as folded back into the band’s engine. They give themselves room to roam, jazzy shading and drifting synth opening real space before the heaviness rolls back in. Muscular and oddly beautiful at the same time.
And then the bill comes due. Sleep No More is the bleakest, most furious cut here, its title carrying a whisper of Macbeth as the lyric drops much of the metaphor to look the real-world dead in the eye: water firms pumping filth into Britain’s rivers, an ongoing genocide, the sins of the comfortable. It climbs to a spoken-word coda Starrs counts among his favourite passages the band have ever recorded. The dead rise to collect what they’re owed from the house on the hill. Death takes everyone, rank and riches be damned. A devastating way to bring down the curtain.
A TIGHT EVOLUTION
The obvious move after something as singular as Nell’ Ora Blu was to rest on it, or to shoot a sequel. They did neither. What they made instead is the tightest, most furious record they’ve got, all sinew where the last was cinema, carrying fifteen years of songwriting nous without ever sounding like anyone but themselves, the exact thing most bands fumble this far in. Evolving without erasing yourself is hard; they make it look close to easy.
What stays with me is how the fury sharpens the record rather than souring it. Aiming the horror at reality could easily have curdled into a lecture; instead, it gives all that gothic theatre something real to lose, deepening the band rather than narrowing them. Strip away the concept and the fake candles and the writing is simply top-tier, as deep a set as they’ve ever put on one record, from the snap of Don’t Let It Control You to the sax-slick strut of I Won’t Sleep to the hushed wreckage of Sleep No More.
If Death really is climbing the hill to the mansion, Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats have handed it one hell of a theme tune, a band self-assured enough to gamble and sharp enough to win the bet. Kill the lights, bolt the door, and don’t count on sleeping. There’s no way out of this one.
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats: Website