ALBUM REVIEW: SUBMIT – SUBMIT (Avenue Recordz)
SUBMIT are the latest side project of prolific punk singer-songwriter Spunk Volcano, or Russ Farrell as his mother probably prefers to call him.
Not content with writing songs, singing and playing guitar for glam-punks Dirt Box Disco and the slightly more metal-inclined Spunk Volcano and the Eruptions, he’s now in a third band.
Drummer Maff (Russ’s brother) is in both those bands too, and the hard-to-pigeonhole trio is completed by John Kettle, on bass and backing vocals, He’s their long-time recording engineer and producer, as well as being in folk-rockers Merry Hell and formerly The Tansads – remember them?
Russ/Spunk somehow managed to come up with an album’s worth of songs that don’t quite fit either of his other bands, and recorded SUBMIT’s debut album mostly off the cuff in just 10 days.
One or two of the titles sound very much like DBD/SV&TE songs: Wankers At The Weekend and Motherfucker Days anyone…? But the delivery is quite different, quite…normal even. It’s a record which dwells on the experience of ageing, and how you deal with it – something most of us are going through.
It kicks off with Haunted By The Ghost Of Myself, a cheery little number which seems to be about your spirit looking down on your mortal remains and realising you’ve died.
A Slade-like riff opens Wankers At The Weekend, about being of an age where you’d rather go out in midweek than on Friday or Saturday night, because “this town’s full of wankers at the weekend”.
Getting older, more belligerent and being quite happy with that is the subject of Used By Date, a catchy mid-tempo tune which concludes: “5th of the 3rd 1972/That’s the best day ever so, fuck you.”
The Bits I Lost is perhaps the standout song here; it’s a gentle number about vague memories of the past, perhaps even coping with the onset of dementia. Russ’s skill as a songwriter shines through on lines like “the memories are distant, if not sometimes inconsistent”, and this is a real thought-provoking song.
Things get much darker on Let the Razor Slide, which talks of the excitement and shame of self-harm, and the bleakness continues with I Can’t Swim, about the mental torment of a relationship ending, and how you try to cope by smiling while you’re screaming inside. Listing the platitudes others use to try to make you feel better, it retorts: “Worse things happen at sea they said, but I can’t swim.”
There’s more reflection about the process of ageing and coming to terms with your mortality on Soil And Blood, while the regretful Somehow It Feels Like You Knew ruminates on falling out with an old friend.
The surprisingly upbeat Motherfucker Days is the song here which would best fit on a Dirt Box Disco record, about those times we’ve all had when everything seems to go wrong. Or “same old story, same old shit to deal with,” as Russ puts it, concluding: “I’d feel depressed if I hadn’t already died inside.”
Things come to an end with The Devil’s Game, a slow-burning song which seems to be about contemplating suicide, so we’ve basically come full circle.
This is far from being a happy album, but proves that if he ever decides to hang up the gimp mask, Russ is so much more than a one-man punk songwriting machine. I like it a lot. 8/10.
- SUBMIT is available on CD, as well as from the usual digital download and streaming services. Get it from Avenue Recordz HERE.
