THE LIFTMEN - GOLDEN TOKEN
The Liftmen, a post-punk/psych
band from Bristol led by the prolific guitarist Neil Smith, has a new album out
after a decade-long hiatus. The tracks sound fully formed, benefiting from slow
development out of initial sessions at bass guitarist Jim Barr's J & J studio.
It’s their third album and the first released on Space Heater Recordings. Golden
Token is a departure from their previous Twisted Nerve releases where Rasha
Shaheen took lead vocal duties over post-punk reminiscent of Young Marble
Giants. The harmony vocal approach that Smith, Shaheen and drummer James
Whitby-Coles adopt for this album is the sort of thing Ween may have done as a
one-off song experiment, but only these Bristolians have the bottle to turn
into an album-length practice.
Psychedelic precursors of punk are
lower-level floors lighting up in the elevator these pranksters have commandeered.
The rinky-dink guitar loop at the start of opener ‘Will You See’ taps into a
long and verdant strain of English weirdness with echoes of Joe Meek’s space
age productions and the Dadaist cartoon aura of Renaldo & The Loaf’s Songs
for Swinging Larvae. ‘Meniscus’ and the title track suggest Pere Ubu and
Syd Barrett in their varying mixtures of synth noodling and part-amusing/part-menacing
oddity. Don Van Vliet is, of course, the foundational model for poetic
declamation over avant-rock, but The Liftmen come from a more modern angle than
the Magic Band’s garage primitivism. The music behind the abnormal lyrical perspectives
and juxtapositions touches the outer reaches of the neo-prog solar system where
entities like Cardiacs and Cheer-Accident hang like gargantuan dust clusters.
There’s also a pop sensibility that
adds a leavening accessibility to the avant-garde tendencies. ‘Blue Lagoon’ sounds
like The Slits and the B-52s hosting a beach party before The Ventures turn up
to add an extra golden glow. ‘Meat Sheets’ combines Talking Heads-refracted
Afrobeat with doomy sludge meanderings into a nightmare scenario the title can
more than adequately suggest without further assistance. ‘These Witches’ and
‘How Will You Find It’ suggest the Banshees adopting the sprechgesang approach of
Art Bears. Whitby-Coles adds vibraphone to closer ‘Memory Sketch’ that brings shades
of Tortoise in all their cinematic splendour.
A sense of continuity seems to
connect the Victorian-era caterpillar illustrations adorning Ralph Solly’s
cover art with that of their thematically similar previous releases. The band
themselves adopted a lepidopteran guise in the animated video for ‘Troubled
Teens’ in 2012. ‘Meniscus’ hints at a panpsychist sympathy with the anatomically
miniscule, interspecies or inanimate that evokes Wire’s ‘Outdoor Miner’ or the Zolo
phantasy of Godley & Crème circa Freeze Frame. It’s a kind of
radical empathy at the heart of The Liftmen’s surrealism; a valuable corrective
to the increasingly toxic levels of anti-environmental brutality
that characterises contemporary political discourse. For all its punkish aggression,
humanity, however insectoid, runs through this group’s determined weirdness.
Text: (C) Copyright by Jon Kromka 2026
Golden Token is out now through Space Heaters Recordings and available on Bandcamp:
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