Featuring DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN's new kit-basher Gil Sharone on drums, There Be Squabbles Ahead is impeccably produced by Dan Rathburn of SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM, but instead of relying on the latters' persistently atonal and intentionally unfocused dreamy mixture of jazz, prog-rock and dark cabaret music, STOLEN BABIES' twisted panoply of sounds is exploited in a direction that is much more song-oriented, yet no less intriguing.
They do share MR. BUNGLE's or other Avant-Garde recluses' love for the experimental, the abstract and the absurd, but their punch feels a lot more Punk-y and tuneful. Led by an abrupt, occasionally slapped bass-line, Awful Fall's New-Wave groove is not radically different from something Danny Elfman might have sketched out back in his pschycotronic prime as OINGO BOINGO's leader. Ranging from Spill!'s high-pitched screams and pseudo-Black-Metal riffing to the gypsy swagger of the Balkan brass band instrumental Swint? Or Slude? (one of the two tracks where Carla Kihlstedt, of SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM and TIN HAT TRIO fame, jumps in to help on violin) or the perfectly crafted and masterfully orchestrated Ennio Morricone-meets-Siouxsie Sioux Goth-Pop of Lifeless, this never comes across as random genre-hopping. It is more of a dizzying, disconcerting, schizoid trip to the crypt and into its morbid narratives, scheduled to the last creepy detail.
Singer Dominique Lenore Persi has studied her Mike Patton and is definitely capable of convincingly sounding like a woman teetering right on the brink of sanity, but wisely never refrains from playing it relatively straight if needed. The ballroom dance of Filistata finds her impersonating a tortured spider-souled femme-fatale with the self-assured bravado of a panicked noir diva, whereas in the nihilistic first single Push Button she doesn't hesitate to spit out biting lines such as the more you believe, the less that you think/ the less that you think, the more that you speak/ the more that you speak, the less that you see /the less that you see, the more you believe with a cocksure, ice-cold attitude reminiscent of  BLONDIE's Debbie Harry, quickly readopting this approach and endowing it with a Nancy Sinatra-like underlying sense of sexual menace for the cinematic, chilling murder ballad Gathering Fingers.

If you'd enjoy sleepwalking from dusk 'till dawn with Quentin Tarantino and Tim Burton co-directing your steps, feel obliged to sink your teeth into this bat.