Whitehouse - Wriggle Like A Fucking Eel 12" single review at Forcefedrapture.com

I began to appreciate Whitehouse more when a woman requested a radio DJ to play "Footloose", as she wanted to hear music that would help her feel more anger towards the WTC attacks and attackers…The new single from their forthcoming album "Bird Seed", "Wriggle Like a Fucking Eel" is a prime example of the new sound and lyrical bent that Whitehouse approached on their 1998 album "Mummy and Daddy". Their brawny, rapid fire, exhilaratingly aggressive and well-honed cacophonies are now accompanied by lengthy texts showing the obvious influence of author and bandmember Peter Sotos. Lyrically, Whitehouse’s previous serial killer fetishism and monosyllabic sexual commands now seem to have diverged toward Sotos’ refined voyeurism and accurate, yet sadistic dissection of people’s real behavioral motives that doesn’t fall into the obvious, dusty, tired and limp realm of "social commentary". Founding member William Bennett has even gone so far as to print the lyrics and covers on Wriggle and last year’s CD "Cruise" in the same font that Sotos’ recent works are published in. (And if that wasn’t enough, Sotos’ name now appears before William Bennett’s in recent listings of the group.)

Very generally speaking, Wriggle’s lyrics form a cryptic, brutal(ly poetic) yet very specified rant focused on the degradation of an unseen, lesser, individual that wants sympathy, even though this person’s myriad problems seem to stem from his/her own failing and prior lack of concern. You fucked up your life and these gentlemen are here to make you know exactly why. In every single painful detail you conveniently chose to forget about. (Though knowing Whitehouse, I imagine that this interpretation may change somewhat when viewed in context of the entire Bird Seed album…)

As with the title track from Cruise, Wriggle has Philip Best and William Bennett sharing the vocal assault with Best delivering the majority of the abuse. As usual, he sounds rabid and damn certain that whoever he’s berating deserves it, and of how much he enjoys doing it. Side B of the record is an extended (7:23) instrumental version of Wriggle which I assume is intended for a DJ crafty and malicious enough to mix with other tracks, as Aphex Twin and Russell Haswell did with Cruise last year. It also provides an excellent means to analyze how the music on Side A is structured. Although probably too early to tell, it looks like Mummy and Daddy, Cruise and Bird Seed could possibly be grouped together as forming a trilogy.

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