Independent | Lazarus and The Plane Crash | Horseplay | ****

The Independent - ****
Lazarus and the Plane Crash: Horseplay
by Andy Gill
January 2012

In their determination to go out on any limb, regardless of taste or safety, Lazarus and the Plane Crash – a collaboration between Guillotines singer Joe Coles and Stephen Coates, grey eminence behind The Real Tuesday Weld – display the kind of risk-taking absent from The Maccabees’ album. Coates stitches together jazz samples, wailing bluesharp, wheezing squeezebox and scarified guitar, while Coles leaps in with off the cuff vocals that test the boundaries of propriety, delivered in a snarling croak akin to Tom Waits. It’s the id-monster having a party, coming on outrageously to anything that walks, with no mind for civility and a healthy regard for mortatlity; “This fleshy cage, it’s all the rage/You dance around for a bit, then they chuck you in an earthy pit.”