I've always understood the U.K. to not just tolerate but celebrate and propagate eccentricity in some of its citizens (maybe just wishful thinking). Where oddity in North America is ridiculed, medicated, or locked away our cousins seem more celebrating the odd.

Enter Lord Mongo. While nowhere near to being completely off his nut a la Ted Nugent, he does come off as a bit of a theatrical madman on the stages of his hometown of Manchester. Pics I've come across have him as a frontman gracing the stage with oversized costumes, large one-dimensional masks, and cardboard & straw heads. While it would appear the live Lord Mongo experience is quite a kick, this release seems to be a little more restrained. I thought I might be in for something that would have resulted in a lab experiment involving a Spizz and Julian Cope mindmeld. Nothing doing, I'm afraid. "Booze" is a collection of solo home recordings over a four-year period (1999-2003) done as Lord Mongo or Tudor Plasm. The majority of the songs seem like rough instrumental sketches of late era Chrome & whatever UK spacerock morphed into in the late 70s and tend to wander into the darker recesses of current experimental/progressive/indie rock. As you might expect from home recordings of a very underground & very theatrical mind, the tracks are rough, jagged, raw, stupid, & proto-evil blasts of returded urban punk dub decay. Surprisingly there is little discord from one track to another even though it might be expected given the tracks span a good deal of time, fidelity, and even genre. Certainly one of the major strong points of "Booze" is the consistency of quality from beginning to end. I wasn't too sure of it at the outset, but I'm down with it now. 7/10 -- Chris Jacques (29 June, 2006)