Who, what, or indeed who is Mononym? Is Mononym more than just a mononym? Is he, she, or it somehow actually less ? These were all questions we were asking in 2017 when Shades of pain was on everyone's playlist, whether we wanted it there or not. How many times could we lie fallow, basking in the breezy opening track Invert Sugars before we felt very, very annoyed that we had done so? How long would it take before we realised that Angeleek consisted of no lyrics and only one chord, and even that was a simple C Major? The mononymously-titled one later revealed himself to be former Nub keyboard warrior Douglas Hemp, but by then, of course, the musical damage had already been done. And still there were more questions that remained seriously unasked. We had to wait until last year for a second Mononym album. Was it as good? No! Was it better? Again, no, and that should be implicit in the fact that it wasn't as good! But Mononym has a decent record when it comes to defying logi...

  When Nub first collapsed onto the scene in 1995 with their self-titled debut album, they defied categorisation.  Even Professor Bertrand C. Treband, head of band categorisation at the University of Oxford Institute of Categorising famously failed to categorise the band, eventually reducing the options to 'post-post-punk' and 'pre-post-post-post punk', both of which were rejected by all four members of the power trio. By the time they released Pissinfectant , they had settled on a more defined sound that, while still essentially uncategorisable, could at least be categorised as 'not actually very good'. Not that this mattered to their legions of hardcore fans, most of whom were equally not very good at their jobs, lives or relationships. And it was to this sense of failure that Nub appealed - loudly. This second album was literally recorded in the hope that it would fare worse than the first. Tracks such as 'Mob-handed pipe jockey' and 'My invisible...