REDISCOVERED
THE YUMMY FUR
Piggy Wings ROCK ACTION
8/10
Full-pelt mayhem; retrospective kudos for spiky 1990s Glaswegians
EXPLAINING the creative spasm that sparked him to form ne-plus-indie Scots the Yummy Fur in the early 1990s, John McKeown explained: “Sonic Youth and Nirvana was all-pervasive; everyone was doing full-on noise and weird sorta stuff and we were just like FUCK THAT!”
If The Yummy Fur yearned for simpler things, that is rarely apparent on this distillation of their two-and-a-half albums and armful of singles. Released on near-neighbours Mogwai’s Rock Action label, Piggy Wings is a dangerously overheated stew of puritan guitar clank, Captain Beefheart melody tumbles and wise-ass witticisms, which comes on like The Fall, Huggy Bear, Bogshed, The Fall, Pavement, the Fire Engines and The Fall.
“I’d like to make a civilised customer complaint,” hectors McKeown with typical venom on “NIght Club”. “Why is Throbbing Gristle considered inappropriate in discos?” A valid question in 2019, but one entirely out of tune with the populist-minded mid-1990s, when Britpop, the Spice Girls and “indie-dance” made the post-Bis splurge of “fanzine” bands seem like they were making a rather pious virtue of failure. Disembowelling The Yummy Fur’s 1997 all-sorts compilation Kinky Cinema, NME placed the band firmly
