Snap You Like A Twig, the lead track on US angular battlers Party Of One’s new single, is based round a driving, garage-rockin' track of nightmares and broken relationships ( government, other people, time). As such, it’s a decent enough Pavementish Weenish offering – but the brilliance is hiding away on the underside of the angular Minnesotans’ 7”.

Choose.

Listen.

The tuned-out Country guitars are panned left and right. They speak in single notes, from the root to the fifth, from the ground to the top of their cowboy hat. Which is speckled with brown-caked visions of internal haemorrhage. Or mud. And bruises. Or make-up.

And stool-sat singer Eric Fifteen begins to unravel a terse monologue of broken-balled, unfulfilled desperate grasping for a present wherein power and passion are exchanged and the only resolution comes with shared vicious shards of barely-suppressed, sneering violent frustration.

Joined between verses for a four-bar folly by female vocals, the track swells into a stagnant but familiar cadence that hints toward familiarity, consumption, dried-up tears, drawling deserts of tense misunderstanding. It’s an expansive track oblique with orphaned emotion, latent suggestions of insurrection, loss, crushing defeats, sexual recklessness, domination, upside-down worldview.

Star Sky Sierra is a pithy, piss-stained skull of servile resignation and erotically charged outre obfuscation; its vulnerably twisted cursed-and-blessed reflection of energy-sapping resignation is as powerful as it is inventive, as confused as it is beautiful. Personal and political at equal turn, this is as important an anti-conflict song as anything you are likely to hear.

If you choose.

If.

you choose

to.

Listen.