The War On Pteradactyl

Do you know what I'm not doing tonight? Going to The Wheatsheaf. Great place, of course, but if I did it three nights in a row it wouldn't do me the world of good, I suspect. You can't live on a diet of Oxford Gold and tinitus, can you?


V/A – WE DO NOT HAVE A DINOSAUR (download)


People doing things for charity, we like that. People doing bleepy things, we like that. So, let’s be honest, we’re well disposed towards this Japan tsunami fundraising LP from promoters The Psychotechnic League and The Modernist Disco, featuring various flavours of Oxfordshire electronica. As is the way with this sort of thing, the record feels more like a grab bag than a carefully cohered entity, but anybody with a passing interest in digital dance music should find something to make the fiver tag acceptable, not least the efforts from the curators of the project: We Are Ugly (But We Have The Music) offers a simple little chugger that sounds like it could have been made by a schoolchild on their Amga (not necessarily a bad thing), and Space Heroes Of The People’s “Kosmoceratops”, an insistent spiral of buzzing synths that’s like being harangued by Jean-Michel Jarre at a political rally.

There’s a fair variety of styles on offer, from Left Outer Join’s crusty trance that brings back king Rizla memories of Astralasia, to icy Biosphere tones from The Keyboard Choir, and Sikorski’s chest-thumping synth rock (which we don’t really like, because it sounds like Big Country doing Eurovision, but it makes a change). “Winter Sounds 4” by King Of Beggars isn’t the arctic techno we were expecting, but rather a portentous grid of synthesised harp with a bleak vocal direct from early OMD, and it’s rather great. Meanwhile, The Manacles Of Acid live up to their name by producing straightforward acid house with samples about, err, acid house; it’s almost criminally unoriginal, but if like us, you find any vestige of critical opinion evaporating in the face of a 303, you’ll agree it’s bloody brilliant. Tiger Mendoza and Cez can also hold their heads high.

But we end with the best. Coloureds have made a track called “Tennis”, which is logical, because listening to its relentless chopped vocal fragments feels like spending four minutes as the ball in a game of Pong. It also sounds like it’s going to break into Orbital’s “Chime”, which is obviously fantastic. Perhaps not a perfect LP, but one well worth getting hold of...unless you’re one of those people who thinks that electronic isn’t real music, in which case just go stick your head in a bucket of elephant dung. I bet even the bucket is plastic. Can’t even get a proper tin bucket nowadays. Poor you. Yes, yes, we know: hell in a handcart.