45 minutes of a bad trip.
Sounds like Love or 13th floor Elevator that has lost their ability somewhere in the back of the time machine they have just emerged from ... very strange and very muffled.
'Muffled' would indeed be the word. And so would 'loose' ... Imagine that a typical tight band – or the idyllic band that every act looks up to – is a tight jigsaw of pieces, all complimenting one another. Well, Squeezal is more like a load of jigsaw pieces from different puzzles, attached together with pieces of string and gum found from down the back of the mixing desk. Does anyone have the heart to tell this simple Maker that it doesn't really work like that, and that you can't just slam things together and shout, 'DERR! I DONNIT!'? It just isn't cricket.
Probably what makes the sound of the band sound so darn strange is the vocals. Somewhere between Garfunkel and a deaf Christian new wave folk singer, words are pushed out, stuck onto the backs of disgruntled notes with blue-tac and thrown out of the speakers at every which way. But then, focusing on the vocals would make it sound like the rest is quite fine and dismissible, which it isn't. There are plenty of things to make the listener feel like this is a genre of special music that is only semi-understood by the musicians in the band. It's an in-house joke, surely?
And so your face is pinned onto the side of a jelly sculpture and a druid made of mouse fluff is gnawing at your invisible, inflatable Plato ... Ho-hum.
Admittedly, each song has a distinguishing quality, setting it apart (on string and bits of gum found down the back of the mixing desk?), and hence claiming a space of its own in the field of nutters. But all of it is in its little world of junk guitars, Argos casio keyboards and a complete disregard as to what typically makes a song work. And contrary to Squexxel's adamant belief, it isn't singing about dragons, cherry suns, other mythical twaddle, and whining effects, and out of tune japery.
At a push, it could be put in the same pot as off-beat Momus, but that is generous, I think you'll agree.
Getting through this once all the way through is hard enough. So don't bother. It's ridiculous, and is utterly ridiculous. Heartfelt, maybe, but also more importantly, utterly ridiculous.