The Dudley Corporation: Everyone Does Everything Wrong

With 13 songs crammed into 39 minutes, it seems Dublin’s The Dudley Corporation have eschewed the slow-burning epics that characterised much of their three albums to date, concentrating instead on immediately arresting sub-three-minute punk tunes that burst into your cranium with all the subtlety of a haymaker.
The drums grind out the rhythm like duelling pistols, the guitars screech and groan, and the pace and power is pretty relentless, as Dudley & Co. play out what’s effectively a homage to the great American alt. rock heavyweights. The mid-paced ‘The Drop’ is on at least nodding terms with Pavement’s ‘Shady Lane’, ‘Grey Lights’ is a not-so-distant cousin to Nirvana’s ‘All Apologies’ and the power pop of ‘Under The Lamb’ and ‘Anamalyze’ is comparable to the great Bob Mould, albeit more Sugar-y than Husker Du.
For the most part, The Corpo take the most frenetic bits from their musical heroes, barely coming up for air, although the mid-paced ‘Useless Humans’, the title-track and ‘Art Of Flight’ do allow band and listener to take a breath. The mid-section is anything but flabby, with the ferocious ‘Kind Of Light’ and the muscular ‘Laugh It Up’, but by the time ‘Little Blue’ comes around, it’s all a little late-period Sonic Youth.
Thankfully, they leave the best to almost-last, with the uber-infectious two-and-a-half minutes of ‘So Sorry’ the most likely to gain them new admirers and radio plays. That aside, Everyone Does Everything Wrong is a not-so-easy listen that will doubtless please long-time fans, but is unlikely to garner them any cross-over appeal. Still, at this stage, they hardly care.

Key track:'So Sorry'