Past Work

Romantic grindcore isn’t really something you’d expect. Anal Cunt did it with Picnic of Love, but that wasn’t really grindcore, it was Seth Putnam, singing out of tune while playing an acoustic guitar. What Wheelchair x 4 have done here is take the spirit of Picnic of Love and actually put it to a soundtrack that is clearly grind, an oxymoron in itself considering the aggressive and fairly male orientated genre it is.

The theory is pretty much the same; Wheelchair, much like A.C., have become known for having a fairly sick sense of humour (they did an E.P. about Jade Goody called Bald and Dead) but here they’ve taken out the sickness and replaced it with touching tales of true love and taking it slow. They even add a sample from one of the ultimate weepies Brief Encounter.

Musically it’s Wheelchair through and through; with the slow building riffs and blasting drums, but quite frankly on this E.P. it’s all about the lyrics. Taking their sardonic humour and pointing it at that oh-so-elusive thing: true love. Filled with situations and stereotypes that we’ve had forced down our throats since Hollywood realised there was an audience for the ultimate romance they cover everything from ‘going Dutch’, meeting Mum and the idea that just to survive we need that one person to make us happy.

While A.C. did Picnic of Love to pull the wool over the eyes of the people who’d followed them, Wheelchair have made a joke out of romance to prove what a joke our ideas of romance were in the first place. Not to mention the fact that hundreds of ‘respected’ artists have trodden this path before and if a grindcore band hadn’t written this Adele probably would have and it would be number one at the moment.