What if you left your child at the after-school club for English Heretics and never bothered to pick them up?

Listening to The Childminders’ debut EP ‘Jesus Christ is from North Yorkshire’ you might start to wonder quite who has been minding these children? Mark E Smith? The Residents? All that can be said is god help them – or rather us – that someone has come along with the necessary wit to ask: what if Uncle Meat had a cheeky nephew with ADHD? What if you wanted to make an album less listenable than ‘Trout Mask Replica’, but you also wanted to smoke weed and fuck Jennifer Coolidge? What if you left your child at the after-school club for English Heretics and never bothered to pick them up?

These are all difficult questions raised by The Childminders debut EP, ‘Jesus Christ is from North Yorkshire’. Yet beyond an amazing title and an eminently jarring list of inspirations, it is a project that stands on its own two feet as a chic yet self-consciously ugly debut in equal parts charming, sadistic and sleazy.  There is a sustained frenzy to the EP’s shardy and half-song-like structure in which every track confounds the last with an utterly bastard lease of life. In stark relief to the bewitching minimalism of Reuben Pugh’s other project Troutflies, The Childminders offer an utterly unhinged and maximalist approach to both sonic structure and conceptual seduction.  The future is here, the anaesthetics are wearing off, and we will soon be left with the horrible feeling that it was in the frenetic language of advertisement that modernism found its final repose.

‘Jesus Christ is from North Yorkshire’ is suffused by a sort of late-teenage laughter issuing from the psychotic outside of English culture: a kind of comedy in which a distinctly post-internet plunderphonics is rejoined by an incorruptibly regional angularity. The result is a scattered yet menacingly inviting mega-dérive into the milf-inflected and hallucinatory land of the hard living. Much of the project recalls the delerial unlistenability of The Fall’s outtake ‘Where’s The Fucking Taxi? Cunt’ – yet it is as if it has been zapped with a modish online hyperreferentiality, like some strange sort of drunk corpse dragged backwards into the present day. The project feels like it is drawn equally from states of isolation and intoxication in which an overspilling boisterous conviviality exists alongside a poetic voice striving for something far more strange, singular and monadic. It is in the dual articulation of these two affects – the comic/erotic and the paranoid/psychotic – through which The Childminders offer a genuinely compelling and utterly contemporary commentary on the gout-ridden post-modern malingerance of England’s long and very present decline.

I have to admit of all the many twists and turns The Childminder’s may take you on, it saves its most malign spectre for last – that of the disgraced celebrity chef Gregg Wallace: who – like OJ signing photos in jail – now makes most of his money through recording jarringly charismatic birthday messages for his ‘fans’ online. What, if anything, is there to make of this bizarre and culturally unwelcome presence? It is as if the Childminders are cursed by a knowledge that the soul of a conflict that raged in this country from John Ball to Ian Ball, may now be so dormant and hopeless as to play out largely in the domain of daytime television. What are we to think of ourselves living on this rainy fascist island? We are soulless! Floundering in the bad karma of bad empire: England is no longer a nation that produces dissidents, our avant-garde lie dormant in the ground, and we gave up on poets 500 years ago. And yet, we still hold onto something of a global eminence when it comes to producing the most insufferably megalomaniacal light entertainers to ever walk the earth.  While certainly controversial, it is on some deeper level Gregg Wallace’s presence that epitomises the perverse, almost voyeuristic, estrangement from the present that allows ‘Jesus Christ is from North Yorkshire’ to feel like you are listening to something of a truly authentic document of contemporary England. Or maybe it’s just something they did for a laugh, who bloody knows … Whatever it all adds up to, I urge you this much: go sit on a park bench, smoke something nice, and let The Childminders take care of the rest…