Anarcho-Animist Frontline Weapons sees UKAEA come out swinging on behalf of the badgers. “Fuck the cull, fuck anti-science, fuck the Countryside Alliance, fuck the baiters, fuck you,” is a robust position. Essentially a remix EP with proceeds going to help badgers, main man Dan Jones revisits material from the Birds Catching Fire In The Sky album and puts it through the wringer. His own hype for the release – “smashed beyond all recognition and reassembled into something with more kick drums in it,” – suggests Jones embracing his love of hardcore for a set of hectic face-chewing bangers. That’s not exactly the case.
Or, not entirely. Pushing ‘La Stessa Croce’ harder and faster, ‘BADGER 3’ is a rolling dancefloor thumper offset by bursts of abstract noise but keeping Silvia Konstance’s vocal ringing out on top. Jones treats the vocal takes here with respect, floating them over new settings that he’s happier to break and mangle. Human and defiant among the chaos. Dali De St Paul’s voice cuts a clean line through ‘BADGER 2’ as blasted sonic fragments swirl through the smoke and noise and the rhythm stop-starts, dragging between fits and shudders. Likewise Deyar Yasin moves with grace and steady purpose through an exploded landscape of breakcore beat wrongs on ‘BADGER 4’.
Anarcho-Animist Frontline Weapons is less a set of dancefloor re-fits than a burning sickness, claustrophobic anxiety punctured by paroxysyms of rage. Jones’ relation to hardcore/gabber/breakcore is honest but he uses their tricks and tools for his own purposes. On the relatively calm ‘Badger 1’ he smears Conny Prantera’s voice across tough but somehow distant beats, as if they’re coming through the wall. Too atomised for anyone to imagine dancing to it, it’s more of a disjointed lurch between pummelling blows. After the track winds itself down, the last couple of minutes are an aftershock, steam rising off an empty car park as the storm passes
UKAEA’s erratic and esoteric nature has always been central to the project’s charm. The ‘Anarcho-Animist’ tag initially seemed to be a semi-comic show of solidarity with the angry badger on the cover but it goes some way to capturing the combination of distaste for rules and trust in unconscious forces that makes them special. Birds Catching Fire In The Sky was bleak and apocalyptic to begin with; in badger form it’s feral and even more furious. The pounding bursts of percussion that erupted across the album re-energized and running riot.
