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.
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