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Think your life’s crappy? Pah. I’ve just read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which, as far as I can tell, was nothing more than a literary exercise on the author’s part to redefine the word ‘bleak’.

In The Road, McCarthy takes the meaning to whole new levels of shuddering misery from whence the word itself can now only be written in a special ink made from a mixture of the ground bones from your recently deceased cat, and orphans’ tears.

So, all you struggling writers looking for work, and new bands (who are on the road in a very different manner), read the book and take heart. Life looks better when you haven’t had to cannibalise babies for food yet.

Stained Glass Heroes‘ Insects is pretty menacing and post-apocalyptic itself, albeit with more of an exoskeletal slant. The guitars grind mechanically, the vocals are crooned through the last remaining walkie-talkie, and the chorus is a relentless insectoid scuttle. It’s a rather brilliant, rather camp, lurching monster of a song with a hook that you’ll hum robotically for aeons.

Stained Glass Heroes – Insects

Dashing quickly from Schlock-rock to edge-of-reason drumbeat fiasco, Turkish Wedding shakes with lunatic precision, drawing all around it into a wild, circular, rhythmical shimmy.

Uncomfortably close in name to dreadful US Rap-Rock (urgh) outfit Gym Class Heroes they may be; but if Stained Glass Heroes are the musical accompaniment to the apocalypse, I for one will enjoy my senseless killing and pillaging rampage just that little bit more. Sharpen your butcherin’ knives and listen here!