The Lovely Eggs @ Roadhouse, 29/11/12

In 1916 during the ‘year without a summer’ Lord Byron, his physician John Polidori, Percy and Mary Shelly and Claire Clairmont spent some time in a rented villa by Lake Geneva. Kept indoors by incessant rain they spent their days contorted on irresponsible amounts of laudanum telling each other ancient and fabled ghost stories. It was from these rainy days spent in earnest that inspiration seized Mary Shelly and bid her write the great gothic horror story Frankenstein.

Nearly 200 years later a band called the Lovely Eggs played a show at the Roadhouse in Manchester.

The Lovely Eggs are like your cool, boozy aunty and her stay-at-home boyfriend who gives you your first puff on a joint and plays you Sparklehorse on his record player. He wildly points out the best bits and explains that his records and the player were the only thing he managed to rescue from that bitch he was seeing before he met your aunty.

Just then your aunty comes in from the kitchen with half a bottle of Campari, an avocado and a packet of Penguin biscuits and your soul is instantly given the texture your mutilated, teenage body has been crying out for since sporadic hair growth, explosive sweat glands and giddy erections took over.

Back to Manchester and the Lovely Eggs charge through their rampant set with endearing violence leaving punk ditties in carnage, griping all over the stage. Song blood poured out of strangled melodies leaking in trembling pools off the stage and in to the soles of the front row stomping feet. The rest was mopped up by the drum mat, absorbed and recycled into the drum skins, beaten to a pulp like a pair of bruised kidneys.

Middle eights were severed and strewn from their thrashing carcasses. Shrieking vocal lines drove spikes hard through glaring eyeball observations, delivered with grinding copulation against raw, waggish nerve endings. Some literally had to stitch their ears closed to combat the infectious whim. The place was a bloody mess.

The audience was eclectic. A throwback punk, a flat cap folkie, some girl dressed like Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction throwing interpretive dance moves at the shoddily placed pillars. A man in a tracksuit, a man on a horse, some twat with a flag and a couple with no hope. They were all magnificent.

In the midst of all the chaos, the blood and guts and remnants of three albums worth of material, the severed limbs and noxious mix of muso freaks, a hideous monster was formed.

A mash of cyclic verses, crushed rhythms and social misfits held together by grating chords and dirty jagged hooks. Given life with the throbbing heart of punk and the distorted energy of tragedy and joy Frankenstein stood bewildered and grotesque, flapping wildly in delirium and adoration of his Godly revivers the Lovely Eggs.

Words: Samuel Buckley