Boss Hog – NME: Itchy & Scratchy [Review] (PRESS, UK)

These two tracks were issued by Levi’s as a promo CD single.

Levi’s call them ‘Engineered’, the new-fangled denims with the bendy seams, yet the 16-year-old girl upstairs on the 73 bus slagging off passers-by with her mate calls them “mingin'”. To you, the discerning consumer of cutting-edge music, however, they are merely the excuse for two groups of undernourished indie waifs to make some long overdue wonga by selling their songs – and therefore also their souls – to The Man. One fervently hopes both Clinic and Boss Hog estimable ensembles both, agonised long and hard over the ethics of permitting themselves to be used as an indirect rool in the grinding progress of international capitalism, if only to save the rest of us the bother, and also blagged some free samples while they were at it. Because the best you can say for this sort of as-heard-on-the-annoying-bits-in-between-shit-programmes-on-ITV sales manoeuvre is that the people concerned should at least endorse the product they’re helping to sell. And surely Cristina Martinez and Jon Spencer are too cool, and Clinic too sensible, to indulge such a crummy style mutation. Purity’s not what it used to be, it seems.

Cracking tunes, though.”