Sans Pareil have become somewhat of an enigma. Mysterious, dark, and difficult to classify. Over the course of the last two years the brain child of vocalist/guitarist Thomas Dowse has now solidified its line up, and crafted the second album, ‘The Future Ooze’.
Arguably their most refined work to date, ‘The Future Ooze’ blends the swagger of garage rock, with post-punk fury and disjointed noise, providing the perfect soundtrack to the dystopian narrative of Dowse. As we bring you an exclusive first listen to ‘The Future Ooze’, he gives us a glimpse through the window to his mind, and talks us through each of the nine tracks on the LP.
‘Snake Footprints’
I had the first line of this straight away- “I was on the beach at Romney….” but no idea where it would go from there. After a bit of digging I found out about a notorious smuggling gang who terrorised the south coast in the early 18th century so I took that line as a starting point. Snake Footprints is a fictionalisation of the real Hawkshurst Gang’s raid on a customs and excise hold in Poole. The raid is an audacious one and shows the full might of the gang but it was also to be their undoing….
‘Track Suit Debris’
Track Suit Debris is the story of the demise of the Snake Footprints, so a kind of Snake Footprints part 2. I wanted to blur the line between the Police and the criminals, both of whom are undertaking sinister means to assert their dominance.
‘Waste Compactor’
There is a narrative thread that runs through all this work that people are becoming nothing but rubbish- they have no value anymore. I wrote the lyrics to this even before the migrant crisis really began to penetrate our collective consciousness as profoundly as it has and it bares out what i’m saying. As a society we are actually saying that we’d prefer people to be left for dead rather than share what we have in abundance with them. “…..we accept it, ’cause it’s not our problem”.
‘A Scumbag Panorama’
This is a portrait of any town centre in the UK on a Friday night. What starts out as a depraved booze up soon develops a more murderous dimension and introduces us to the bizarre and mythical ‘White Road Estate’.
‘Codename: Tarantula’
When John wrote the Guitar line for this I immediately had a strong series of images appear in my head, like a graphic novel, so I tried to describe what I saw. It kind of flies like a drone across the townscape, dipping into scenes and out to the sinister smoke stacks in the distance.
‘You Give Me (The Creeps)’
This is a Love song to our abusive relationship with technology. We are sculpting ever more intimate relationships with our phones, our laptops. They see and record everything but our trust is misplaced. Who really is at the other end of the camera? Who really is reading our sexting? Who really is gazing out of the screen as we masturbate? We know the truth but cannot tear ourselves away.
‘Meat Wagon’
This was born essentially from an incident involving PC Alex McFarlane who strangled a young black kid during the London riots who had the composure to record the incident on his phone. The officer is heard literally telling him: “The problem with you is you will always be a nigger” and is heard saying he strangled the boy because he is “a cunt”. No charges were ever brought against that officer so I put it the exchange verbatim into the lyrics. There is also reference to the shadowy officer V53 who is the man who shot Mark Duggan in Tottenham a few years ago. The facts surrounding that case are illuminating and amount to little more than an execution in the street, something the Met do not have the authority to do. It sparked riots across the country and his family have campaigned for justice but of course, no charges were ever brought against those officers who even went so far as to fabricate evidence and alter the scene of the crime to appear more in their favour.
‘Gina, Unattached’
There is a road in Chatham called New Road along dark sections of which sex workers ply there trade. I knew a girl whose parents lived in some of the nice houses along there, houses built for the admiralty at Chatham Dockyard in centuries past, who despaired at the unsightliness of them and constantly appealed for them to be moved on by the Police- swept under the carpet essentially. I always found that reaction disgusting, inhumane and compassionless, so the character of Gina was born from the desire to articulate a mere fraction of what it must take to force a person down that road.
‘The Future Ooze’
William Burrows once said-“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out”. I embellished it a little as I feel like the future does ooze, slowly and malevolently like hazardous waste or magma. Almost imperceptibly. The full horror of where we have come to dawns on the protagonist suddenly amidst a rare lull in the blizzard of his nightmare. The first Mad Max film is close to how the apocalypse will be. Not an explosion. Not a sweeping, all consuming pestillence. Not a final cataclysmic war but a creeping, oozing derision of our humanity, so slow that we won’t even realise we ever had any.
‘The Future Ooze’ is released on April 29th via Hot Salvation Records, and is available to pre-order now. Sans Pareil will also be playing select dates over the coming weeks, which you can see below.
APRIL
30 FOLKESTONE Harbour Arm (Future Ooze Release party)
MAY
01 CANTERBURY Bramleys w/Mass Lines (Future Ooze Release Party)
06 NOTTINGHAM Stuck On A Name w/White Finger
12 BIRMINGHAM Hare And Hounds w/QUI (David Yow of Jesus Lizard)