LICE, Bristol’s avant-garde group, is back with more intelligent cacophany on Third Time At The Beach, their second album, on new label AD93.
Built on the philosophical quicksand of their 2021 debut Wasteland: What Ails Our People Is Clear, this release promises to explore “history, science, and how we explain it all to each other,” with the listener visiting “ancient civilisations, the Industrial Revolution, outer space and the land of the dinosaurs: encountering mediaeval farmers, silver miners, cavemen, Napoleon and Satan”. The press release also helpfully informs us it’s a three-part epic of exploration and transformation. The first movement (‘Unscrewed’, ‘White Tubes’, ‘Red Fibres’) presents a child being shaped by culture, realising they’ve reached adulthood without truly understanding the world. The second part (‘To The Basket’, ‘Wrapped In A Sheet’, ‘Scenes From The Desert’, and ‘Mown In Circles’) disorients with abstract explorations of money, time, and nationhood, while the third (‘Fatigued, Confused’, ‘Third Time At The Beach’ and ‘The Dance’) embraces new understandings, with a protagonist who has learned to navigate the chaos.
Like reading the tasting notes for expensive wine, some will have nodded sagely at that last paragraph, and others will already be chugging from the bottle. Trying to explain LICE’s dense music risks it all sounding like word salad tossed by an existentialist chef. Also, if you’re new to Alistair Shuttleworth’s vocals, be aware: some will hear the voice of nihilist, intellectual genius, while others would prefer a long train ride next to a toddler with a harmonica. Despite all this complexity and divisiveness, Third Time offers much to appreciate, if you’re up for it.
Things open with some tinkling whimsy reminiscent of Willy Wonka’s ‘Pure Imagination’, before ‘Unscrewed’ thuds its beat like a broken washing machine spin-cycle. Shuttleworth reels off the first things we learn: colours, days of the week and months of the year, before suddenly pausing to ask with uncanny self-awareness: “you look as though you are trying to ask me a question”. Some pretty rippling piano then ensues, leading us into a bit of skewed bossa nova. The music fights for your attention with some bizarre lyrical imagery—geckos scaling fuselages, ants dissolving, a dangerous looking box… All very much LICE so far – a listening experience like Squid Games where only the determined will reach the prize.
They start to show their teeth on ‘White Tubes’. Abstract and punchy, it twists its own head on and off with spurts of violent guitar, pitch-shifted vocals and intermittent buzzing static. Next, ‘Red Fibres’ – lead single and provocative album teaser – is one of the more accessible songs here (well, in the same way Dead Kennedys ‘Too Drunk To Fuck’ or ‘Holiday in Cambodia’ are accessible). Shuttleworth’s commanding vocals cut through pulsating punk-inspired noise and the band just clicks. Silas Dilkes’ dynamic guitar work and Gareth Johnson’s drums come together showing LICE are at their best when the music serves as more than a scaffold for philosophical ramblings. It’s in these few moments of cohesion that Third Time really shines.
The second movement sees LICE pulling apart both their songs and societal constructs, reassembling them in dadaist fashion—destroying established structures like money and nationhood, and creating possibilities for something better. If you’re in the mood to unlearn what music, or meaning, even is you will love it. If not, To The Basket and Wrapped in a Sheet will be distractions, like hallucinatory side-quests written by William Burroughs. Vocally, Shuttleworth explores a slinkier, more menacing side here — imagine Bobby Gillespie at a carnival, sipping peyote tea, twirling a throwing knife. The standout in this middle section, Scenes from the Desert, skulks in the dark, with occasional gentle piano and saxophone refrains put under a UFO spotlight. Field recordings and more vocal pitch shifting pile up alongside conflicting metaphors until you either get lost in it all, or you completely tune out.
By the time we hit ‘Mown In Circles’, Shuttleworth sounds more like a version of Shaun Ryder who’s been marooned on Tarkovsky’s Solaris, delivering a stream of consciousness about misinformation and the circular traps of modern society. We are prisoners in Dante’s 8th circle of hell: “Unquestioned lies / Accept and repeat / You’re perpetuating everything,” he growls, as the band grinds along with a feverish intensity.
The third movement brings everything together (in a way). The rest of LICE joins Ryder-Shuttleworth and goes full Black Grape on ‘Fatigued, Confused’ , a non-linear phantasmagorical boogie-woogie, held in place by tape reel, synth pads and strings. Shuttleworth flows and gushes prophetically like TS Eliot : “Oh! Fatigued, confused and dark’d by the overhead kids at play/ My God-big heart pumps life to a cast of wanderers fanned across space… “ The title track Third Time At The Beach is the album’s turning point, with visceral imagery decrying the oil industry pouring in from all sides: “We could make sand-castles. We could bury x or dig up x. We could move our tracheas into our throats. We could grow our brains cracking shellfish. With tools we made with growing brains.” Shuttleworth hisses, name-dropping Narmer, Sun Tzu, Boudica and Bonaparte. (Side note: Listen out here for a clever reference to the debut album, with shouts spelling out the message: “When our people learn what ails us we can better serve our interests”.)
The closing track, The Dance, wraps things up with a noodly meditation on the blurry boundaries between life, death, and everything in between. As Shuttleworth sings, “A friendship of what’s living and dead / Of Earth and elsewhere / Of dreams and the real things that dwell in them,” the album’s concept comes into sharp focus: the metaphor of the beach, where the familiar land ends and the unknown stretches out. How often do we find ourselves standing on that shore, unsure whether to wade in, or stay put? LICE isn’t offering answers, just the nudge to keep walking in any direction.
Third Time At The Beach is complex, unpredictable, and, yes, occasionally baffling. For sheer ambition alone this album deserves a ten. If you made it to the end, congratulations. For anyone willing to let go of all and any preconceptions of what a ‘good’ album is supposed to sound like, it offers a uniquely thought-provoking experience.
Now, “just be quiet, let me think” !
