Here is England's greatest contemporary lyricist, Ben Parker, coupling his words and fairly singular guitar playing with the punishing drumming of his brother Adam to create perhaps the greatest unheard record of the decade. The contents of defunct duo Nosferatu D2's We're Gonna Walk Around This City With Our Headphones On To Block Out The Noise -- recorded years ago but only now available in stores -- seethe and brood with startling intensity, as Mr. Parker's narrators botch relationships, asphyxiate under the weighty, numbing press of an increasingly homogenized consumer culture, and second-guess their way into oblivion. The songs are uncompromising and raw: drumming is foregrounded and everywhere; torrents of lyrics occasionally unhinge from verses; and there are barely any guitar effects to speak of, save for the distortion and feedback in the stunning track "We'll Play The Power Of Love By Frankie Goes To Hollywood A Thousand Times Tonight." In the hierarchy of credible angst in post-punk music, there's Morrissey, there's Cobain, there's Ben Parker, and then there's everybody else. Parker spits devastatingly personal lyrics as if they burn his mouth ("at the time I think I just thought they were funny. I guess a lot of stuff happened in those two years," he remarks in the liner notes). Most songwriters are lucky to have one line in a song that hits home; Parker's lyrics and their desperate delivery are all stunning. We're Gonna Walk Around This City With Our Headphones On To Block Out The Noise opens with the line "the only place I feel alone is in your arms," and the record gets increasingly harrowing from there, climaxing in the spine-tingling, final :29 seconds of the track "Springsteen." In those last moments Parker sputters over and over "It's all up here! Point to my head!" before boiling over with two terrifying screams. That the tune is followed by the beautiful, calm opening of "We'll Play The Power Of Love By Frankie Goes To Hollywood A Thousand Times Tonight" is just brilliant sequencing. The record's most immediately satisfying track, "A Footnote," conveys the disappointment of being an avid music fan in a way that could only have been written by an avid music fan: "and every song that makes me cry is embarrassing to talk about, and the worst album will always be the last one..."
We're Gonna Walk Around This City With Our Headphones On To Block Out The Noise was never released during the two-year span (2005-2007) in which Nosferatu D2 was a going concern. And so we were very excited to learn that it was finally to be properly released by the new label Audio Antihero 16 Oct. The set had very nearly been released in 2007, according to Parker, and in fact was so close to being issued that the title was chosen and the art work contracted. Alas, Nosferatu D2's split indefinitely shelved We're Gonna Walk Around This City With Our Headphones On To Block Out The Noise. For a long time the set was available for free download from Last.FM, although the title and art were not included. The title, incidentally, comes from the opening line of a never-completed Nosferatu D2 track, according to Parker. Parker previously fronted the trio Tempertwig and is the current proprietor of the newly dual-member Superman Revenge Squad.
Nosferatu D2 --
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