Nudy Bah!

When I submitted this review, the editor wrote back, asking if there was any chance I could remove the word "mong".  Erm, yes, without a doubt.  I must have been 17 before I discovered what mong meant, after many years of calling people "mongs" and "monging out" - I still sometimes forget what it actually means and how offensive some people may find it...to me it just sounds harmlessly childish like "doofus" or "durr-brain", and I find it comes out unbidden.  So, in Nutshaft you'll have seen it replaced with the word "dweeb", but I've left "mong" in below for the sake of honesty.  There's a lso a little bit extra here than what ended up in the published edition, making it EVEN MORE critical of the shit acts.  but they were pretty shit...or at least one of them was, and 2 were just unconvincing.  Evil Eye were good, although I have seen them play better.

Oh, and here's the June Ocelot piece, which is absolutely idiotic.  Or mongy, if you prefer.

Vegetable fronds uncurling against an alien horizon.

Exasperated scientists arguing with hidebound politicians in a striplit bunker.  Thick teak tables are pounded, plastic coffee skiffs upended, sheaves of closely scrawled paper collapse in the slipstream of a flailing white-coated arm.

An unearthed Neanderthal riff mutating on contact with air, spinning into Mandelbrot patterns, engulfing camera crews and lone hikers alike.  A light drizzle on the heaving, writhing hell creature, as it rests before the next attack.

Augmented hyenas tearing at the carcase of a lost courier in a feral weed-choked city.  Cracked surveillance cameras film the atrocity from multiple angles, sending the footage to data banks that shall never be accessed.

A rusty blues mechanism marching to a burnt out war, a conflict that has become meaningless habit to a cyborg militia.  Ballistics flash on the horizon, scarring the brown dusk, but are ignored by trudging chrome feet. Forces clash.  Infantry fall.  The final result is ambiguous.

A trio made up of members from much missed Oxon acts Dr Slaggleberry and 50 ft. Panda has made a record of abstract rock and brutally ornate dynamic switches played with a winning mixture of improbable precision and sweaty metal abandon.  It is available in digital form on a pay what you wish basis from Bandcamp, or in a fetching handmade sleeve on CD.

Pretentious rubbish by ponces who wouldn’t know a proper tune if it bit them on the balls in 13/8.

At least one of these is a fair description of Masiro’s debut EP.

NUDYBRONQUE/ CHARMS AGAINST THE EVIL EYE/ TORN LIKE COLOURS/ MARK SOLLIS, It’s All About The Music, Wheatsheaf, 13/6/14

Mark Sollis’ voice sits somewhere between a supper club crooner and a wounded bear.  He has a song about sheep, replete with melodic bleating, and a song about local musical miserablist and walking Gallifrey Base discussion board, Mark Bosley.  Put it like this: he has character, and character goes a long way.  But, sadly, not always far enough.

Torn Like Colours, on the other hand, have apparently had all their character removed, possibly by the sort of high-spec vacuum packing device used to seal an astronaut’s risotto.  Their music is a hideous melange of suburban rocking, something like Lita Ford without the leather, and relentlessly joyless chirpy pop, something like drive time on Satan AM.  They try to inject some interest by knocking out a tired mash-up and nicking an intro from “Eye Of The Tiger”, but none of it saves a moribund set.  We suspect this band escaped from an English language teaching video in 1988, in which some plucky kids save the endangered youth club with pop and rock, whilst explaining the gerund.

Charms Against The Evil Eye also sound like they’re stuck in about 1988, where their lives were filled with erudite indie, poetry and occasional caches of scratchy Oxfam psychedelia.  The lyrics could mostly have been culled from Science & Nature questions from Trivial Pursuit, which is a refreshing change from the norm, and the songs are neat, built on unexpectedly muso-ish fretless bass and precise drums, and topped off with guitar that jumps between Peter Buck chiming and blurred Gedge hyper-strums.   Highly enjoyable, if lacking spark at some junctures.

Our beer-soaked gig notebook simply reads “floppy Suede mongs” under the heading Nudybronque.  Not really fair, as their music has the melodic sensibility and feeling of restless invention that typified pre-fame Pulp, but in a way they’re more a bundle of proto-Britpop signifiers than a band; probably great to start a cultural studies discussion with, but not great to listen to.  We suspect this set, in a hot empty room, after the band missed soundcheck when stuck in traffic, is not the one on which to judge them, and our notebook’s dismissive damnation is probably a long way from describing a promising band.  But, sadly, perhaps not far enough.