Opus Kink make a pageant out of misery on The Sweet Goodbye

“Oh happy day, reasons for living / I have accepted the joke as it came,” he delivers with loose, nicotine-stained fatalism, while a self-described Ethio-jazz riff stabs from every direction in brass. Splashed across 6Music for good reason, the single announces that life is rotten, the joke is old and the band have turned up to celebrate. If the album artwork suggests some drowned, miserable rite, musically there is no intention of observing it. The Sweet Goodbye imposes with a “let’s be having you” strut; Nick Cave’s soot-dark theatre abuts the communal, ska-laden frenzy of peers Fat Dog. Lyrically all black water and bad omens, the record is never in service to its symbolism. There is too much fun to be had, too much gaudiness to revel in, the boys forever intent on interrupting the solemnity. “Will It Come For You?” embodies this ethos: repeated jibes that it is, indeed, coming for us are pursued by an ominous undercurrent of horns that evoke Bauhaus in silhouette but Madness in the knees. On “I’m a Pretty Showboy”, those same horns thicken into an ephemeral cacophony before dropping out to make way for a threatening bassline. Even the title track struggles to maintain its gothi...