Up The Arsenal!

I was in Witney the other day eating a beefburger. I'm not proud, but that's how things happen sometimes. There was a family on the adjacent table, and a woman asked a girl, I guess her neice, what she was thinking of.

"A unicorn," she replied.
"What sort?" asked the aunt.
"Err...dunno."
"You must do, what sort?" I began to wonder here whether there was some sort of heirarchy of unicorns that everyone in the world except for me and this poor floundering girl knew about.
"OK, " said the aunt, trying a new tack, "did you see it in the Argos book at home?"
I think the girl found this as odd a question as me, as she just mumbled.
"Or did you see it in an Arhgos book somewhere else?" tried the aunt, really warming to the topic now. I mean, the fact that she clearly considers the Argos catalogue to be some Borgesian repository of all sub-lunary existence is stupid enough, but the fact that she clearly imagines that Argos produce different catalogues for different buildings simply beggars belief.

Idiot.

Anyway, here's some crap about a record you'll never hear.

ALL THESE ARMS - Demo

How to have fun with crap demos, part one: put them into iTunes, and read the incongruous suggestions the software identifies as potential track titles (naturally most demos aren’t registered with the Gracenote database that Apple accesses). Seriously, this feeble comedy can just about get you through the worst of the demo bunch. All These Arms is not the worst of the bunch, but it’s frankly not great, so we glean amusement from the fact that our player thinks we’re listening to the classic Who Shot JR? EP by Jinx Removing, featuring the evergreen “Johnny Depp Was My Friend”.

It’s a pity, because the demo opens enticingly, flexing an old-school synth arpeggio in cheesy fashion, and we originally think we’re in for some distanced but loving vintage rave reconstructions, in the style of V/Vm cohort Chris Moss Acid. Then suddenly the big boy guitars and the over-wrenched vocals tumble into the frame, and we’re left with the desperate flounderings of a stage school Biffy Clyro. Sadly the singing is what really spoils the track, sounding like Molko taking the mickey out of Moyet, but then again the guitarist’s nods to Foreigner aren’t making him any friends either. Just to prove that context is everything, when the synth comes in again, it suddenly sounds tacky and nasally annoying. That was the bit we actually liked, but it’s been tarnished by association with the vapid Eurorock that engulfs it. Bastards!

Second tune “Fade 2 Black” makes a pyrrhic impact by being mastered much louder that its predecessor. Admittedly it is a harder hitting piece, but it never really gets close to “banging”, and has to settle for “perky” – and again, the vocals ruin the show, with horrible yo-yo phrasing - he sings “liyee-yives” instead of “lives” - before just going for broke and doing a full length “iyeeyiyeeyi” that reminds us queasily of Go West’s “We Close Our Eyes” (don’t pretend you don’t remember). Once again the synth gives us something to cling to, with a nice early 80s wibbly figure that you might have heard on an old episode of Rainbow.

Track four is a remix of the opener, and an uncredited fifth tune is kind of fun - providing your idea of fun is a cross between Technotronic and The Alarm – so it’s left to track three (which doesn’t have a title anything as interesting as iTunes’ suggestion of “Stay In School & Drink Your Milk”, so we refuse to acknowledge it) to provide some glimmer of hope. For once the guitars sound sinewy and powerful, the steppa’s beat underneath it all is tiny and tinny but manages to keep the track skipping playfully along, and the vocalist just gets on with singing the song, instead of drenching everything in annoying mannerisms. It’s hardly the best song of the year, but it does possess a yearning quality where the rest of the CD singularly fails to get off the starting blocks.

In saying this, we’re in danger of being forcibly escorted from the 21st Century, but we do feel, sometimes, that too many quotes and references can destroy music: yes, the keyboards on this demo sound like early rave and electro-pop, and the guitars tip the nod to Van Halen, but the problem is they don’t really do anything else. You can reference anything you like, but if the biggest selling point of your music is ultimately that you didn’t think of it, we’re really all going nowhere. Put the studied references behind you, and start trying to create something new. It’s time to leave school. But you can bring the milk if you like.