Pitchfork

When you start a song with the lyric, "Note to self," you've already dug yourself a big old mid-90s hole of irony to dig yourself out of. Here, Mclusky emerge into the open air with miles of dirt under their fingernails, with the most successful of the dynamic experiments that typified this year's The Difference Between Me and You Is That I'm Not on Fire.

Introduced live at their last Chicago show as "a whisper of a song making love to its own shadow" by singer Andy Falkous, the song is built upon a lightly distorted guitar that opts to strum instead of slam, and drums that choose to tap in syncopation instead of crush skulls. Combined with a chiming guitar lead and lyrics like, "Note to invading aliens: Avoid this town/ Like this town avoided us," the song gives new wings to the age-old we've-got-to-get-out-of-this-place sentiment that still must be felt by friendless teenagers lying on car hoods, staring into starless nights.

While McLusky have never hidden their influences, this track dares to expose the slower side of the Pixies and Pavement they've swallowed along with the slabs of The Jesus Lizard and Nirvana that popped up in the stool of their previous albums. It's a brave step for such a cacophonous band, and what better way to end this isolated lullaby than... a three-part harmony singing, over and over, "Our old singer is a sex criminal."

I guess it was too much to expect this band to be serious for more than two minutes, but is there any explanation for McLusky's lyrics, or are they just an amalgamation of Simpsons quotes and non-sequiturs? Do they really have a dismissed former singer now riding the Welsh countryside along with Gareth Brown the prophet and Alan the cowboy killer, looking for new prey? Probably not, but just imagining it must have killed some time for three lads from Cardiff that dreamt of starting a band.