Benefits: Constant Noise

It all starts with a mountain of shit. As opening gambits go, the first utterance of Constant Noise, the sophomore release from Teesside-based noise smiths Benefits doesn’t leave much scope for compromise.

Yet as vocalist and visionary Kingsley Hall gawps, awestruck, at this gigantic word-turd, he leads us on a weirdly empathetic journey through the modern world and its neuroses. Like a contemporary Dante Alighieri, Hall’s terse verse plunge into an underworld. We witness tales of suburban belligerence, incoherent online rage, dreams strangled by a lethal cocktail of apathy and neglect.

Where Dante’s vision drew on ancient legend, Constant Noise hums with hints of the music of a lost youth. Relentless, where “you’re surely not here just to pay bills and then die” has echoes of a life sliding out of view in the manner of Pulp’s Common People while Peter Doherty’s feline vocal recalls “the good old days”. The clatter of bottles in Everything is Going to be Alright’s wheelie bin ushers in a 21st-century Parklife; three decades later, Blur’s grating chirpiness is obliterated by the need to make it, somehow, through another day.

Yet, somehow, we do. Accompanied by Robbie Major’s compelling and concerning electronica – often evoking the unsettling sound of a turn-of-the-millennium floor filler remixed by the howls of tortured souls – Benefits gets us to the other side. Or at least, another side. Where the first album, Nails, was a cry of roughed-up rage, a fist in the face of an indifferent world, all combat and spike, Constant Noise is a different beast.

Beneath the anger, compassion. An understanding of the tiny moments of joy, fragile and isolated, threatened by that mountain of shit avalanching its way towards us. Recognition that a society locked into the incessant drone of 24-hour newsfeed social media hash-tagged buzzwords is a mental health disaster unfolding with the slow-motion car-crash dynamic that began in a motorcade in Dallas, pursued OJ Simpson down an LA freeway and slammed into a Parisian tunnel before pouring into our all day, everyday lives.

The music is new, too. That electronic sound ushers in a new dawn: sinister radiophonic noodling on Missiles, the sound of Dr Who plunging into the abyss; a plangent choir, another unlikely echo of the past; last year’s live shows even saw Robbie bring out his violin on stage. There’s a fresh eclecticism here, with Kingsley explaining that the band is still angry but is now expressing that anger in Technicolor. And, in the brief interlude Lies and Fear, harking directly back to the pugnacious Flag, the stand-out track from Nails that inspired its own tea-towel.

But what remains constant is the sheer lyrical power of Benefits’ work. Sometimes it’s a one-liner – “Nothing happened, it’s just chests at dawn” brilliantly evokes a boozy, beery brawl. Other times, it’s a caustic eye on the creation of an underclass, the lost communities manipulated into riots thanks to cunning abuse of the algorithm.

“Flat capped, whippetted /Regionally voiceovered / Filling up the comment box / Last of the summer whining”.

Always, it’s essential listening. A picture of late-stage capitalism’s cycle of binge-and-purge as it swallows its own tail, only to vomit it back up to be gobbled anew. What will we be required to hate today?

Constant Noise is available on LP, CD and cassette from Invada Records and can be ordered via Bandcamp. Benefits is touring the UK in support of the album in April and May. Details of live dates can be found here.