ANKST « The RingMaster Review

photo by John Middleham

Originally a potent part of the band’s acclaimed latest album, What Nature Gives… Nature Takes Away, post pun icons The Membranes have set their new EP around the song Nocturnal and given 2019 a send-off as memorable as it is contagious. The three track release sees the UK band team up with darkwave-goth rock luminary DJ Kitty Lectro for two remixes alongside the album version of the perpetually additive encounter.

photo by Kitty Lectro

Formed in 1978, the Blackpool band has been leading and helping to continually shape the post punk scene for over 40 years while Kitty Lectro has crafted remixes for the likes of Kommunity FK, Andi Sex Gang, The March Violets, Still Patient, Lestat, ANKST, Strap On Halo, Angels Of Liberty, Das Projekt and many more. It feels like it was inevitable that one day the two would unite and Nocturnal is that glorious moment.

The EP opens with Kitty’s dance floor nurtured take on Nocturnal, the pulse of the track an immediate incitement the body can only respond to. It brings an eighties synth pop feel to the song’s animation, shedding a certain infectious light on the track’s unique shadows and dark intimation. The bounce of the song is inescapable virulence and its dance-floor instincts fertile ground for that physical participation, Kitty bringing the instinctive catchiness of the track to the fore.

Kitty Lectro’s Meow Meow Money Mix is next up and straight away for us eclipses the rousing enjoyment of its predecessor. Cinematic drama instantly breathes across the track as John Robb’s tones slowly and rapaciously crawl through ears, Kitty’s intensifying the song’s original shadows with a devilish touch. It lurks, it crawls, every moment of the track a trespass on the psyche and a spark to major pleasure; its Halloween-esque atmosphere a tenebrific shadow on the world today.

As mentioned the album’s original version completes the EP’s line-up, the track as irresistible as ever. For all the magnificence of Kitty Lectro’s two slices of glorious temptation, they do miss the delicious senses carving, bone scything lead incitement of Robb’s bass. Certainly its swing is exploited within the remixes but here it just directs and manipulates body and appetite even before the prowess of the rest of the band escalates the track’s dark, slightly carnivorous majesty.

Put all three tracks together and you have one of 2019’s best EPs and a proposition 2020 will have to go some to match.

Nocturnal (Kitty Lectro Remixes) EP is available via Definitive Gaze @ https://membranes.bandcamp.com/album/nocturnal-e-p