Crispy Ambulance

Factory Benelux presents a new studio album by cult Manchester postpunk
group Crispy Ambulance, issued in a limited edition of 500 vinyl copies
to mark Record Store Day 2015.
In many respects Compulsion is the second album Crispy Ambulance might
have recorded in 1982 after the release of The Plateau Phase, with six
of the eight tracks written and performed live at that time. To these
are now added Rain Without Clouds, an outtake from The Plateau Phase
newly restored from the original multitrack masters, and WMTP.2 with
added synth lines by producer-cum fifth member Graham Massey, of 808
State and Biting Tongues.
Almost uniquely, Crispy Ambulance has retained the same line-up since
the group was originally founded in 1978: Alan Hempsall (vocals,
keyboards), Gary Madeley (drums), Robert Davenport (guitars), Keith
Darbyshire (bass).
“There’s a sense of feeling compelled by irresistible forces,” explains
Alan Hempsall. “Compulsion is an apt way to describe our constant urge
to go back and make music with people we've known since childhood. While
the world may have changed, our music continues to be the product of the
same influences - the passing of time, the changing of the seasons, the
content of our sleeping dreams, and the existence of space.”
Cover art by Peter Staessens. The package also features a free digital
download of the album.
Praise for The Plateau Phase: "One of the best albums Britain's second
city has unleashed" (Q, 03/2006); “Perfect, wonderful and with a
compelling gravitational pull” (Record Collector, 03/2013); "17 years on
The Plateau Phase sounds like what it probably always was: urgent,
postmodernist psychedelia with less debt to Joy Division’s music than to
the universal abstract existential tension that comes with being young"
(Uncut, 12/1999); "Cold and ferocious, but with enough inventive melody
to lighten the black abyss of the overall mood" (Les Inrockuptibles,
02/2012); "An enthralling glimpse at a moment in musical history when
the DIY ethos of punk gradually gave way to experiments with electronics
and song structures" (NME, 01/2000); "Mixes driving rock, gritty new
wave and odd atmospheric stuff" (Option, 1990)