Call me biased by hindsight, but as soon as I first heard Test Icicles back in 2005, I knew they weren't long for this world. Perhaps more accurately, I hoped they weren't. For Screening Purposes Only is the hardcore, bewilderingly obnoxious, impossible-to-top transcript of their unsustainable fury, a rabid beast that manages to be the British trio's gory birth by C-section and acidic epitaph all at once. The aesthetic is something like this: take a Swiss clock and wind it too tight, stuff the thing with sulfur, eat it, go to sleep, have brain-dicing sexual nightmares in which you and your fantasy object try to strangle each other. (Excuse the stunned hyperbole, there's really no other way to put it.)

I can't imagine what it felt like to get sucker-punched by that infamous one-album phenom called the Sex Pistols way back when, but I'd wager Test Icicles were about as merciful towards the listening public. It's music for your inner masochist, something that takes the phony terseness of the more commercially successful Arctic Monkeys and eviscerates it with the psychotic violence of Torquemada's Inquisition…that's the historical atrocity, not a band. Such convoluted backbiting alone may give Test Icicles' brutality the pedigree it wants. They're sneering at the sneerers. And the fact that the group fell apart so rapidly is good evidence that the bile they spit was venomously real. But as with all aggressively raw guitars and sickly electronics filtered through hi-fi production, it's not without a dose of dishonesty. It's bracingly smart, unflinchingly self-obsessed, an open sore on rock history's skin. Nothing, from the economic bass to non-stop screams, is wasted or spared. It's a tiny bit brilliant. And I never want to hear it again.