Get High and Leave Your Head with Future of the Left

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Listen to this while high: Future of the Left's Polymers are Forever EP.

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Behind the buzz: Hyperliterate Welsh provocateurs Future of the Left scored heavily with 2009's Travels with Myself and Another, so it won't do to dismiss the Polymers are Forever EP (out as of yesterday on Xtra Mile and streaming courtesy of Spin magazine here) as a stopgap between albums. Six songs that clock collectively in at a mere 20 minutes might not seem like ideal stoner rock, but excited squawks from the UK blogosphere indicate this fucker will blow the casual listener though the wall.

Today's weed: Private Reserve, an indica advertised down at the local dispensary as containing a frightful percentage of raw THC calculated helpfully to two decimal spaces.

Loud Times at Bedlam High: The title track is hair-raising stuff -- as furiously goofy as an early Red Hot Chili Peppers joint while offloading a message as wrist-slit depressing as any nit Roger Waters ever picked off his psyche. The second half is a glorious mic-check reiteration about how that plastic bottle you just threw away is going to outlive you and the DNA you slobbered on it. At 1:46, "With Apologies to Emily Pankhurst" whips by like a chunk of hurled pavement, with frontman Andy Falkous snarling like a buttsore payer of alimony. "New Adventures" is a scabrous venture into consequences, and "My Wife is Unhappy" narrates "the final, final, final, final, final, final thoughts of a man unused to joy" as the poor fucker raves of Joe Pesci and crawling sainthood. "Dry Hate" is another gobbet of venom spat at some elusive target, with the couplet "Think of us as ready-made/ Jesus loves a renegade" as ponderable a Lennonism as I've heard in a while. The song "destroywitchurch.com" is a bent political rant highlighted by the line "I had no idea evil had such small ambition," which sums up the Falkous worldview admirably.

Psychoactive verdict: Despite its brevity, Polymers are Forever is a textured and bracing artistic whole that hangs together better than most recent full-lengths. The title track is set to appear on the band's third album, The Plot Against Common Sense, due out early next year.