Mushroom Music Publishing

'Punk does-the-splitz death-charge disco' - NME

'Ferocious, melodic gems' - Guardian Guide

'Brutal and uncompromising' - The Fly

'Curses' is not a drat, a damn, a bugger, or a shit. It's not an oath to be tossed out idly, nor does it take the names of Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha or Lord Xenu in vain. No, 'Curses' is a spell, a summoning. Fourteen pocket-sized, acidic incantations that trip off the tongue and scatter all manner of charms, jinxes and hexes around your person, your living quarters, your friends and your work colleagues. Songs about cats, Tories and the skeletons of tiny children. Guitars that jerk and spark like cattle prods refashioned into impromptu ECT electrodes. Basslines that impact like a deft flurry of feet, like being kicked to death by the cast of Riverdance. Drums that march, bound and turn on the head of a platinum pin. Two heads that sound like they've sprouted from the same neck, thrashing a collective mane, screaming as they hurtle round the Moebius curve of some lyrical enigma. All fashioned into a single, gleaming CD. A CD that will henceforth be referred to in speech and written word as "the debut album by Cardiff's Future Of The Left".

It is neither good nor healthy to tease through the bones of the past, but for the edification of future generations, now we must. Future Of The Left are composed of two thirds of the now defunct Cardiff rock band Mclusky, singer/ guitarist Andy Falkous and drummer Jack Egglestone, and one-fifth of Ammanford rock band Jarcrew, wild-eyed frontman Kelson Louis Matthias. Both bands shared a mutual admiration; both bands bit the dust in their own special way. Jarcrew released one album, got lost in their confusing maze of great ideas, and finally disintegrated shortly after their drummer decided he wanted to spend more time following his faith as a Jehovah's Witness. Mclusky released three albums and finally fell to pieces under largely acrimonious circumstances, the gory details of which the curious can doubtless find recounted somewhere other than here.

Like one of planet Earth's larger land mammals, the group that would eventually become Future Of The Left would be some time in the gestation. It began just as Andy and Jack, chiselling out new directions in Music Box studios in Cardiff. For a while, they were four, for a while rehearsing with Hywel Evans. "It definitely took a while for us to get a sound together, but the writing process got a lot easier when we got back down to three. Everything came together when we wrote 'The Lord Hates A Coward', but we'd been writing for over a year then. That song really set a standard for the rest'. Kelson's instrument of choice was bass - not an instrument he played, necessarily, but then that's not always the Future Of The Left way. "I play a bass like I fronted Jarcrew', explains Kelson. "Just thinking percussively - sort of Neanderthal, if that doesn't make me seem more stupid than I appear'. Somewhere along the way, Falco acquired a synthesiser, which makes its way onto several album tracks. Before long, the band had a name - Future Of The Left. And finally, they made an album.

Recorded across three weekends at Monnow Valley Studios in Newport with longtime associate Richard Jackson, 'Curses' is an altogether broader, more devious, more detailed record than anything that's come before. There are songs about revenge ('The Lord Hates A Coward') Tories (the self-explanatory, Shellac-inflected 'Fuck The Countryside Alliance'), and sausages on sticks ('Wrigley Scott'). But there's also 'Manchasm', a song about Falco's cat, and how it misses its owner when he's off on tour. There's 'Fingers Become Thumbs', which is about evolution. There's 'Suddenly It's A Folk Song', inspired by a biography of Peter Sellers, which explores the chasm between an actor's role and his private persona. There's 'Real Men Hunt In Packs', conceived as an alternative theme tune to The Sopranos. Or perhaps most surprising of all, the closing 'The Contrarian', a gentle Noel Coward-esque tale of social mores which came together when Andy and Kelson found a piano in the studio and decided to write a song on it, each playing one handed.

In short, 'Curses' finds Future Of The Left further trying to stretch and bend the boundaries of what a rock band should be. "It's about something more than three guys coming onstage and yelling 'Rock!' down the microphone', explains Falco. 'I wouldn't want people to see three guys onstage and think that all that brought them here was guitars and disagreements with a variety of authority figures. There can be a fuller, rounder, slightly funny picture to it'.

That's 'Curses'. You'll swear on it.