Dos Dedos Mis Amigos/A Lick of the Old Cassette Box (The Lost 1996 Album)

Pop Will Eat Itself: Clint Mansell (vocals, guitar); Graham Charles Crabb (vocals); Adam Mole (guitar, keyboards); Richard March (bass); Fuzz Townshend (drums).
The final Pop Will Eat Itself album as such, not counting the remix version of this release that followed some months later, Dos Dedos Mis Amigos is the most serious album the band ever attempted, both lyrically and, given the heavier music, sonically. The giddy rush of albums like This Is the Day and Cure for Sanity had always been punctuated by darker, often surprisingly accomplished songs, but on Dos Dedos the ratio was reversed and the stridency pumped up to even louder levels. Opening track "Ich Bin Ein Auslander," with its references to anti-immigrant sentiment in England and the grinding collapse of Yugoslavia set to a pounding "Kashmir"-derived riff, sets the tone and pretty well keeps it throughout the album. Other previously released singles like "R.S.V.P." and "Familus Horribilus," a blackly humorous but musically lighter rip on the Royal Family, nestle up with fine new songs like the slow descending doom crawl "Underbelly" and the part-dreamy part-propulsive pound of "Cape Connection." The band's self-production is much more direct in general than the swirl of Flood's earlier efforts with the group, but there's the same sense of deep texture in the use of samples. More than once there are hints of Clint Mansell's future career as a film soundtrack arranger for Darren Aronofsky and others as much as there is Richard March's own further playing around with beats and mixing in Bentley Rhythm Ace. In ways it's no surprise that the album ended up on Trent Reznor's label in the U.S., seeing as the sound is more defiantly industrial-rock than ever before, but about the only direct connection might be the doom-laden "Everything's Cool," as good a piece of tech-metal from its time as any. ~ Ned Raggett