THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Crankers of amp, torturers of fuzzbox and denizens of small-hours salvation, Thee Alcoholics dished out a rancorous and righteous debut earlier this year with Feedback — an album that filtered gnarled riffage and motorik malevolence through a uniquely debauched prism in pursuit of some extremely ill-advised audial dystopia.
Thee Alcoholics started life as the home-birthed brainchild of Rhys Llewellyn (Hey Colossus / Acidliner / Drmcnt), but an evolution since has proven the ultimate form of this beastly creation to be the live arena. In assembling cohorts to turn these visceral jams into something to shake rafters and rattle pint-glasses, new frontiers of ornery intensity have made themselves manifest. Such is the form of the monstrous Bear Bites Horse Sessions, a live-in-the-studio document recorded with Wayne Adams at Bear Bites Horse studio in Haggerston, London, chronicling a band breathing life into a Stoogesian paradigm, and doing so whilst barely breaking a sweat.
Taking essential elixirs of in-the-red mania, hypnotic repetition and deathless swagger, these 12 jams walk a crooked path that neighbours the nihilistic vortex of Loop, the saturnine lurch of The Fall and the deadpan derangement of The Heads — but remains possessed of a maverick charisma and mischief all its own. Lovers of lysergic heaviosity and the sound of a Marshall 4×12 violently spluttering its last will find much to satisfy here, but moreover Bear Bites Horse Sessions is a testimony to sonic punishment as a gateway to new horizons, audial excess as a path to wisdom, and answers, right or wrong, being found in the bottom of a glass.”
