2 November 2024

LICE are a post-punk hit team from Bristol, UK. Last September they released
their second longplayer, named Third Time At The Beach (stream/buy it below).
It follows their smashing debut WASTELAND: What Ails our People Is Clear
from 2021.

They’re in the middle of a European tour with fellow Brits Deathletter.

On Halloween night they made a stop on their own, in my hometown of
Ghent (their 2nd visit here), for a freaky Halloween gig. The misfits didn’t
need horror masks to get us all in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre mood.

They have Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (real name: Alastair Shuttleworth, really?)
as their demonic voice right in the middle.

Offstage he’s like the nice guy from next door, on stage he turns into a Götterdämmerung creep screaming his 4 lungs out amidst a blistering cacophony of electricity. Sonic exorcism. Schizophrenic outbursts. Dante‘s inferno in motion. Break-up, break-down. Labyrinth paranoia and other related straight jacket hysteria. Lyrically, he mixes reality and surreality with his hallucinations and accentuates the resulting insanity up there on the podium with deafening shrieks that surpass the legal amount of decibels.

Here’s an idea.

It all felt like having an electric chair experience (again). Scary, blood-curdling and totally maniacal. Awesome, right? You bloody betcha. Go and see them if you can. It’s worth the brain-shock.

STREAM/BUY

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Lice: Linktree

Beware, they only look nice (photo by Dani Bolton – @theredbeanienz)