Therapy?

Therapy?, a crew of Irish miscreants who've never let a raging
sentiment get in the way of a rosy melodic hook, is the kind of band record reps hate like the plague. Just when the Suits'n'Ponytails brigade think they have the Irish iconoclasts aligned in a marketing niche, the group mutates into a new virus.

"All the records we've ever made have been different," brogues guitarist and vocal barker Andy Cairns on the phone from Seattle's Hanszek Studio. "There's always been some sort of weird surreal manifesto to every record. I think a lot of people are starting to get the gist that that's the way we work."

A cursory scan of the back
catalog gives quick insight into these changeling ways:

* The band--initially Cairns, bassist Michael McKeegan and drummer Fyfe Ewing--began with Caucasian Psychosis, their 1992 U.S. debut on Quarterstick/Touch & Go. It lurched through enough thorny post-punk dissonance to garner them, for better or worse, the label The Next Big Black. "Potato Junkie" (with its intro verse of "I'm bitter/I'm twisted/ James Joyce is fucking my sister") was a hit at college radio stations daring enough to air it.

* Nurse followed immediately on A&M, locking riffs into a rigid industrialized structure. The mechanical and clattering "Teethgrinder" spun in dance clubs right alongside Nine Inch Nails.

* 1994's Troublegum switched off the machines in favor of punkishly melodic pop-metal, like the barbed teen-angst anthem "Screamager" (sing along, kids: "Screw that/forget about that/I don't wanna think about anything like that").

* 1995's Infernal Love threw an even more massive curveball with its swirling, orchestrated pop. A cello-sawing cover of Hüsker Dü's murder ballad "Diane" hopelessly frustrated any PR flack with thoughts of pimping Therapy? as teenie punk superstars.

After that, even the band members themselves got a little lost.

Fyfe quit, Therapy? didn't release a new album until 1998's Semi-Detached, and that wasn't even shipped to the States. Then A&M folded and Therapy? was left hanging like horses in an abattoir.

Solution: Another reinvention.

After signing with indie Ark 21, the now-four-piece (with Martin McCarrick on guitar/cello and Graham Hopkins on drums) hit the studio and recorded Therapy?'s loudest torrent in years: Suicide Pact - You First. Every track crackles with steel-wool guitar distortion, and the band's energy output peaks near the redline. It certainly doesn't sound like a group whose singer was about to become a family man; it sounds like a gang of hormonal young toughs drunk on the power of a 16-track studio.

"A lot of it had to do with the fact we were really, really excited to do the record," Cairns says. "We didn't want to spend a lot of time. We told the record company we weren't going to make a commercial album, there probably wouldn't be any singles, and we wanted to do something that would be good for us--'cos we'd been through a really shitty year before that. A&M dissolved, and we didn't get any offers from Phonogram, or Polygram, or whatever the hell they're called. So we went looking for people who wanted to release it. And I think Suicide Pact was a reaction to all that. It was us
reveling in the fact that, although maybe an awful lot of the pros of being on a major label had gone--slightly more money, slightly better hotels--the freedom was completely back to be whatever the fuck we wanted."

Therapy?'s trademark darkness, always manifested in bloody-blue (and occasionally quite trite) lyrics, also traded some of the old existential dread for black humor. Where once they screamed like self-flagellating madmen, the band now directed their insanity along a more outward vector.

Quoth Andy: "Our way of survival is to take the piss out of people an awful lot. Not in a kind of comedy-punk way, don't get me wrong. We tend to be cynical but at the same time also see the ridiculousness and ludicrousness of many things. That keeps us sane."

And, as per their usual modus operandi, new influences reared up as well: "There's little bits of lots of the more in-your-face rock'n'roll bands, like early Zen Guerrilla. Even bands like the Hellacopters. And Atari Teenage Riot. I think a lot of the actual influence of the sound of Suicide Pact came from the fact that most of the stuff I was listening to at the time was on Digital Hardcore Records. I just really loved the sandpaper-in-your-face, gritty sound they had."

Therapy? is currently working on Suicide Pact's immediate successor with Jack Endino in Seattle. Yeah, that's right--eight years after grunge hit the world like a long-haired tsunami, and Therapy? is just getting Endinoized. How typically fiscally unwise of them.

Blame the Murder City Devils. Or, more specifically, the Devils and their Seattle sick-boy compatriots like Zeke, the Black Halos, Catheters, Supersuckers, etc., whose Endino connection attracted the Belfast bruisers. But will the injection of American rock'n'roll swagger into Therapy?'s once-serrated style mean the U.S. press will finally "get" them?

Probably not. As Endino recently noted, "No one here in the States knows how good they are except all the bands I know who've played with them over in Europe. Even Mark Lanegan said they kicked his ass, and his ass is not easily kicked." Unfortunately, Therapy?'s schizoid rock has never translated into Americanese as well as some groups from the Emerald Isle.

"There isn't really an 'angle' for us in America as such," says Cairns, with almost cheerful acceptance. "We don't have that Swingin' London thing. And we don't have that U2 look, straight out of Hell's Kitchen: black leather, black stubble, black greased-back hair [er, ignore that above photo, folks--JG], the wild-eyed gypsy look. We don't come catered with a shamrock: 'The Official Produce of Ireland--Please buy us, Boston, Chicago, New York.' We're quite an eclectic band as it goes anyway. People will come around in their own time."