Cleaning Rifles With Your Cousin

Brighton trio Cousin really impressed us with their intricate wiry debut EP Alternate Tunings For Regular People, filled as it was with “tight, intricate guitarwork, incessant grooves, a rhythm that doesn't know how to quit so beats the shit out of you instead, a melodicism that is infused with equal parts sunshine, narcotics and playful disdain.” (that’s me quoting our review. I don’t think I have ever done it in this way before. Weird.)

Back in March the band released their follow-up EP Music To Polish Your Rifle To (out through Fcking The Night and Barely Regal Records), maintaining their faux-instructional pretences while playing with the wordsmithery, the titles of the 6 songs evoking backwoods sweat-stained inertia and anxieties. Don’t worry, the music has stayed the same – Cousin are clearly infatuated with the Polvo school of atmospheric intricacies. In my opinion the new songs are a little muted – a sense of gravity pervading the compositions, a subtlety that belies the playful nature of the song titles. So the languid nature of ‘Oversized Haulage’ or the freneticism of ‘Dry Steering On A Wet Road’ feels undercut by a rich seam of control, of tempered temperatures, of zen abrasion. I was expecting something more frenetic, more sinuous, yet Music To Polish Your Rifle To instead enthrals through intricate mechanisms designed to entrance, to control. Pick it up here.