That inimitable style of drawing that graces this EP's cover lets us know exactly what we are in for: rough and ready songs about death. Just like the cover, the songs here are from the same mold as previous outpourings of gloom from the trio. There is no massive shift in style or approach: ten songs; 20 minutes; in and out like a SWAT team on a midnight raid.
“A Handful of Dust” takes T.S. Eliot’s famous line from The Waste Land and turns it into a parody of itself. What is a chilling and resonant line from Eliot’s poem is a pantomime snarl in the hands of Nick Blinko. However, Blinko can hardly be expected not to stamp his own identity on any line he sings, especially when it is such a cherished line in literature, and in the context of No More Pain as an entity it works a lot better than taking the song at face value. Nearly every song here is about death and annihilation (especially the track “Annihilation”), not exactly a cheery record.
Blinko’s venom comes through on most of the songs, especially on “Eyes of the Dead” and the title track. Grant Matthews and Jon Grenville’s no nonsense bass and drum assault hammer home the songs, conjuring up the previous image of a SWAT team thundering up a staircase and crashing through a heavily barred door like it was paper. The macho vibes disappear for a moment on the quirky “Doodlebug Baby,” a song most incongruous on such a bleak album (though the dark humour does not move away totally from the grim reaper’s scythe).
The EP closes with a cover of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major (transposed to the key of E to suit the guitar/bass setup of the band). It is such a convincing appropriation of the piece that when I first listened to the album I was racking my brains trying to figure out what classic punk song was being covered but it was only when I remembered to check the sleeve notes that I realised what was going on. This is a far better commandeering of a cultural treasure than the above-mentioned Eliot quotation; a nudge and a wink at the end of so many songs about obliteration.
Yet there is something about Rudimentary Peni in 2008 that is lacking. Punk has long been a hollow shell of itself and any bands from that era that are still around have gone down one of two roads; greatest hits money spinners like the Sex Pistols or dramatic redevelopment projects like Wire. Being contrary curmudgeons, the Peni have walked a middle ground. They have not embraced change like some other bands have, at its heart No More Pain is a direct sibling of the group’s older material with a shinier production. Equally, they cannot be accused of “selling out” as they are hardly the kind of band kids in clothes shops want to listen to. They are dwellers of a limbo, still credible but not exactly lighting the world on fire.
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