The debut album from London town's latest gang of hip young gunslingers, Chat and Business screeches into life with a sound like fingernails scraped bloodily down a blackboard. Fear not, though--it's merely Ikara Colt's contrary way of redrawing the boundaries. Frustrated by the mainstream aspirations of modern indie, these four sharp-suited insurrectionaries have written an album that should rightly sit like an ugly scar on the face of the mainstream. An unholy mix of post-punk touchstones like Joy Division The Fall, and The Pixies, bound together with treble-heavy no-wave production values and stern militant stance, Chat and Business hammers its point home with an unnaturally sharp focus. The opening "One Note" does pretty much what it says on the tin, a one-chord clatter of yelping insouciance and bloody-knuckled guitar scree with edges so angular they could cut glass. "Rudd" thieves a leaf from Mark E Smith's book of non-sequiturs ("Short-wave radio! Cheap magazines!" they shriek, as one). And the excellent "Sink Venice" is Ikara Colt's one impassioned stab at getting a hit, an addictive scream-a-long that hooks its talons around your ears and refuses to let go. It's an unashamedly messy, scrappy debut--but you'd better believe, making a bloody racket is a serious business.--Louis Pattison
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