Uranium Club’s music can best be described as warped, or maybe wiry. Or perhaps groovy is best. Or… unsettling? It’s very difficult to pinpoint a singular adjective, because these Minneapolis “punks” take experimentation and creativity to a whole new level — on Infants Under the Bulb, the band ushers in its most ambitious period to date.
Infants Under the Bulb is the band’s fourth album and first full length since 2018’s excellent head scratcher The Cosmo Cleaners. For their latest, the band added a horn section and wrote a four-part spoken word mini-epic series of interludes aptly titled “The Wall” that tells the tale of a protective, anthropomorphic wall that splits a town in half but eventually brings two women together.
Things open with the jittery twang of “Small Grey Man,” an espionage-tinged track that finds its protagonist scaling château walls and cracking safes, loudly calling for a Seven and Seven (hold the Seven), all while looking to trade sex for information.
The song actually dramatizes the mystery surrounding a man known by the alias Peter Bergmann. After spending a few days in the small country town of Sligo, in County Sligo, Ireland, “Peter” was found washed up on the shore of Rosses Point beach in 2009, dead from an apparent heart attack. To this day, he still hasn’t been properly identified, and the song depicts him as a potential secret agent, one who was simply using an alias to mask his true identity. Perhaps he was disavowed by some clandestine agency or another. Despite the chilly, esoteric subject matter, “Small Grey Man” works beautifully because the lyrics are so evocative, compassionate and personal. When the horns come in for the first time, it feels like a curtain opening to reveal a somewhat sunny day: it’s not bleak, just grey. There’s a lingering sense of paranoia and distrust; in the self, in others, in the world. It’s claustrophobic and tragic, an apt metaphor for how “Peter” must have felt: he’s as unsexy and uncool as any of us in the underwhelming real world, but in his fantasies, he’s Diabolik.
“Viewers Like You” has a bouncy, bumbling ‘80s energy, complemented by spiky chords and bleated horn riffs. On the instrumental “Game Show,” Brendan Wells’s elastic bass playing — the band’s secret weapon — is particularly prominent and driving. The sombre strains of “Tokyo Paris L.A. Milan” tell a disturbing tale of escape and exile, filled with images of trains and ships, swaying bodies, singing children and the annihilation of the titular cities. “Abandoned by the Narrator” is the album’s most punky, frenetic song, a blast of drums and reckless strumming that features a bendy single string riff; It repeatedly comes in and out of the track, bobbling underneath the jabs and giving the song its wobbly uncertainty.
While most of Infants Under the Bulb is tense and angular, the scattered songs that make up “The Wall” suite are a hushed group of tracks that feature nothing more than a watery keyboard under the spoken-word narration. It is controlled and direct, but while “The Wall” is an interesting experiment, it unfortunately ends up feeling entirely out of place. The sentiment of the central story is unmistakably sincere, and the short interludes slow down the frantic nature of the record. It also toes the line of being incredibly pretentious, something the rest of the album happily avoids.
Penultimate track “Big Guitar Jack Off in the Sky” is the best, most chameleonic song on the album, made up of four distinct parts, each of which conjures a different version of who Uranium Club are: after an extended off-kilter instrumental intro (a musical reference to the titular wankery), it enters into a danceable mid-section with only four cryptic lines of lyrics. Eventually, intersecting lines of guitar and a loopy ascending piano part collide with horn accents, splashing drums and more offbeat poetry (“The end in plain sight / Nothing so human as the human touch / As I step off the edge of the world”), before everything starts squealing and squelching. The roll-accented motorik drums, staccato guitars and stop-on-a-dime ending are classic Uranium Club, but it’s the bursting sax that becomes the inevitable star of the proceedings. It’s a cacophony that would make the Stooges proud.
Infants Under the Bulb is the result of a talented, focused group of musicians embracing their eccentricities and expelling them through these complex but strangely accessible compositions. From the ever-evolving music to the album’s cover — which depicts an enormous group of red poncho wearing volunteers coordinated into a 120-foot-wide spiral — Uranium Club don’t do anything half-assed, and this album is another stellar work in an already impressive discography. With Uranium Club, everything is executed to the nth degree, which unsurprisingly makes Infants Under the Bulb a very rewarding — if exhausting — listen.