Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats – Wasteland

9/10

UK garage doomrockers Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats are back with brand new album “Wasteland”. On the cover we see the siluette of a man above the outlines of a city. A camera lens peeking out from his brain through a hole in his head.

Like previous records by Uncle Acid this one too is a conceptalbum. They have treated subjects like serialkillers, madness, cults, murder and manipulation on older albums but the new “Wasteland” has a different story behind it. This is the soundtrack to a futuristic journey through a post-apocalyptic world of paranoia, technocracy and surveillence where the common man lives isolated in giant walled cities filled with propaganda screens, memory implants and technology gone wrong. “The Jailers”, or government, always present behind the cameras, screens and minds of the sleeping population.
Something like George Orwelles 1981 and George Lucas THX1138 combied.

Through the eight songs we follow a group of nameless citizens in one of these cities and the journey they make from escaping the system and the city wasteland only to find themselves in a different kind of wasteland once outside the walls.

Musicallly this album has the traditional fuzzy guitars with one foot in the Black Sabbath camp and the other in the Beatles camp; twinguitar melodies between riffs born from seventies rock and blues. But since the last album “The Night Creeper” from 2015 Uncle Acid has evolved a bit. A few different musical spices have been added to make this rocknroll stew even spicier. On the titeltrack you have acoustic guitar, piano and strings that come together to make this track into something so much more than it had been with only electric guitars. On “Bedouin” a howling trumpet helps the guitars fill out the main melody. In the songs “Shockwave city” and “Blood Runner” frontman Kevin Starrs and his band of deadbeats adds a dose of “new wave of brittish heavy metal” (read Iron Maiden around 1980) while on the first single of the album “Stranger tonight” they have added elements of sixties pop. One might think that with all these different styles thrown onto one album it would make it sound scattered and unfocused but instead it makes Uncle Acid sound so much more solid and interesting.

“Wasteland” is a step forward musically for Uncle Acid and as long as they keep delivering cool backstorys to their albums and keep the guitarriffs and guitartone the way they have they can add whatever they want to their songs because it will always sound like Uncle Acid.