The freaks come out at night...
When I first heard these guys I was lost for words. Not an easy task. Stolen babies are more than just another band with an album of songs. They are a genre all to themselves. They are a lifestyle; an art-form; quite possibly a religion. One of the best ways to describe them would be to say that they are what I expect The Spooky Kids would sound like if they had ever escaped the molesting advances of Marilyn Manson, and he hadn't eaten them up in a large bat-wing, and rats'-balls soup.
There is everything that you would want from an album just in time for Halloween, short of excess chocolate and a sugar-induced coma. Straight from the beginning first song 'Spill' has a church bell ringing before a church organ chords its way into your head, making you check under your bed and in your closet for things that go bump in the night! Soon the song kicks into life with an electric shock and we have the semi-screaming female vocals from Dominique Persi, whilst Gil Sharone thumps the skins with the aggression of someone that needs a hug. 'Awful Fall' has pinging bass lines, and it's noticeable that Dominique sounds a little like Patricia Day from Horrorpops, or a Gwen Stefani with PMS.
The jolly organ playing on 'Filistata' gives me visions of puppets dancing with blood dripping from their wooden hands, and it's the imagery that is projected from 'There Be Squabbles Ahead', that makes this band so morbidly enchanting. This could be the soundtrack to a sideshow, with its almost nursery rhyme feel. 'A Year Of Judges' could be a gentle version of a Newlydeads' track, whilst 'Tablescraps' is a mid-tempo industrial romp. 'Swift or Slude' is a positively scary instrumental that is a cross between something that an ice-skater might perform to, and ghoulish-fairground music, which is a kaleidoscopic array of instruments stolen and forced to perform together...
'Lifeless' is a slow and gentle song leading you into a false sense of security, whilst there are echoes of Skinny Puppy in 'Tall Tales' blasting out with pure industrial adrenaline. The album slightly dips towards the end as the two songs of 'Push Button', and 'Gathering Fingers' are slow and come in just under ten minutes.
The album has also rather poetically been described as '...(an) induced trip thru a carnival's freakshow inside a rundown Mental Asylum, as midget clown orderlies run amuck prodding your senses with electric cattle prods, while dementedly laughing as blood drips slowly from your eyes, ears and other bodily sockets..." Ah, I can't get enough of 'Midget Clown Orderlies'...
Stolen Babies are original, cooking up a pot of different styles experimentally and served with delight to the misfits, the Goths, the suicidal and the mentally unstable alike; and I think that is the market that they have aimed for. Stolen Babies don't want to be popular; they want to be infamous. So taken as a whole package, from the whole of their eerie songs, through to their wickedly designed website, to the packaging which all has Tim Burton style drawing by a person by the name of Crab Scrambly, the whole thing is a marketing success. You have to like it in a way that The Addams Family aren't so kooky, but different and rather charming...This is the music to rob graves and dance with the dead too. Where's my pick-axe, mama?