I always thought it a bold move when rock musicians attempt to use high literature as inspiration. Dante’s Inferno has been used and misused on many occasions as one of the prime examples of canonized writers, Cooleridge found companionship in Iron Maiden with the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, etc.

In the case of Danish Raunchy, the source of inspiration for their latest effort, ‘Wasteland Discotheque’, is a more recent writer. T.S. Eliot was one of British Modernist writing’s stalwarts and is probably best known for his ‘The Waste Land’ from 1922.

I remember ‘The Waste Land’ as a piece of heavy disillusionment with only minimal beams of hope, a result of the horror created in so many artists after the First World War, the most traumatic experience for western civilization in the early part of the twentieth century.

In the interim period between the two world wars, art and writing displayed more directly the cruelty and evil that is inherent in even the so-called civilized cultures, and with the Second World War, a new and farther reaching disruption and hopelessness grew out of the ashes of five years of mindless human brutality. Traditional thinking made no sense in the light of what the Nazis had done. Or even in the light of the cruelties committed by the supposedly good guys. The world had, so to say, fallen apart, and had to be put together in new ways in a feeble attempt to make sense of it all – that was Post-modernism.

It may well be that Raunchy’s lyrics are inspired by Eliot and his Modernist thoughts, but their music is not. No, it is as Post-modern as it gets: an eclectic, even fragmented collage of sound, bringing together styles that rightfully do not belong together – because Raunchy is a pop band, only, they combine it with the sounds of metal.

They have the catchy refrains, melody, groove, the synths, the samples, tons of little industrial sounding trick that a studio can conjure up and then the hard, driving guitar work that makes it so metal.

What they do makes sense because it sounds good. In fact, it sounds very good. The new album is harsher and more cruel than ‘Death Pop Romance’ (2006), even though it is softened with the Rockwell cover Somebody’s Watching Me.

Raunchy manage to control the interface between pop and metal in a unique way and for that they deserve a lot of attention.
Try it out!