Here's the text from this month's Ocelot, if you're interested.
My
gran said, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”. A philosophy that got her sacked as a British
Rail announcer. Still, even she would
baulk at the current trend, whereby reviewers aren’t allowed to hear the tracks
they must judge until they have “liked” them on Facebook. Is this relationship not farcically inverted? Has there come a time when judging something
positively is pretty much the same as noticing it? Once, my editor had to set up a Twitter
account to laud a record before we could even get a copy of it, which is
putting the cart so far before the horse that the horse can’t see the cart and
doesn’t remember the cart and suspects that the cart was a rumour put about by
equine pranksters.
So,
in this spirit, I am championing a band who have never send me stupid emails or
begged for me to vote for them on some spurious gig-grabbing contest, but have quietly
got on with being noisy. Junkie Brush
are playing some gigs in March, and you can expect a violent clash between the
grubby ire of classic British punk and the taut, clinical disgust of DC
hardcore. Not only is their music a
headlong flurry of rage and spittle, but they have two tracks with “monkey” in
the title. And one called “Exhume His
Corpse (And Make Him Dance For Money)”.
And lots with rude words in. If
you can’t say anything nice, say it as loud as possible, that’s our credo.
By the way, in the printed version, the review below misses out two very important words (my fault, not the editor's), see if you can guess which ones...
ANDA UNION, St John the Evangelist, Iffley, OCM & SJE
Arts, 7/2/13
World Music reviews are often taken up with descriptions of
the instruments, techniques, and even outfits. Education is all very
well, perhaps, but nobody starts a dubstep review with an Ableton tutorial, and
such lecturing seems to be evidence of publicists and journalists – and
sometimes the artists – playing up the “otherness” of foreign cultures, as if
we’re only supposed to understand them as some diverting National Geographic
slideshow. We can’t confidently confirm whether the two-string fiddles
Anda Union play are morin khuurs, but neither can we tell a Stratocaster from a
Jaguar, and that never hurt us (in fact, we secretly think it makes us better
than tedious musos who can); what we can tell you is that this band is
phenomenal, hiding glorious melodies in a dark swathe of harmonised throaty
vocals and relentlessly abraded strings, capable of forlorn beauty even as they
whisk you up in a rollocking gallop. The range of vocal techniques is
astonishing, from a lambent wistfulness that reminds us of Celtic folk, to
tingling overtone singing, sending eerie motives across the music like damned
Debussian flutes.
Much of the music is clearly influenced by the environment,
with imitations of rushing wind and clanking stirrups, but there’s enough
melodic sensibility and suppleness on display to make it more than mere sonic
metonymy: the opening of the last piece was clearly supposed to recall
whinnying horses, but the cloud of wraithlike glissandi was more akin to Ligeti
than a rodeo. Oddly, the one thing Anda Union repeatedly remind us of is
The Velvet Underground. They have the same knack of bringing complexity
and depth to material of heartbeat simplicity, and smuggling gorgeous tunes
into relentlessly thumping mantras. When the strings leap from aggressive
pizzicato to swooping arco plummets it’s like “Venus In Furs” fuelled by
fermented mares’ milk instead of heroin.
No, we don’t learn much about Mongolian culture from this gig, but we go
home buzzing from complex harmonies and stampeding rhythms. Which would you rather have?
