German Bite, Perhaps?

Really nice record, this.  I only reviewed it because one of the band is part of the team behind Supernormal, which regular readers will know is my favourite festival.

TEETH OF THE SEA – HIVE (Rocket Recordings) 

This is Teeth Of The Sea’s sixth album, and fittingly it sounds like six albums at once. Locked within these 41 minutes you’ll find alt-rock, techno, fluffy pop, EBM, a whiff of teenage metalhead guitar, and even a soupcon of easy listening. Hive mostly consists of melodic instrumental oddities, but a pair of pulsating pop monsters show themselves early on. 'Get With The Programme' pushes low-key vocals against an aggressive square wave arpeggio, Depeche Mode’s doomy tunefulness doing battle with Front 242’s shiny leather shimmy, and is followed by 'Butterfly House', a hothouse-ripe synthpop track with the slightly wry vocals of Kath Gifford (previously of such great acts as Snowpony and Moonshake). Occasional slashes of guitar could have come from INXS’s Kick, and if that’s a surprise then God help you when the sugar-coated shredding arrives half-way through, direct from a Van Halen tribute. 

'Powerhorse' couples its rough sandy textures with a sinuous synth bass, sounding a lot like a macabre reptilian version of Boards Of Canada’s 'Roygbiv', but the album’s centrepiece is 'Megafragma'. Fortunately – or tragically? - this is not a 9-minute avant-garde cover of 'Toca’s Miracle', but a hypnotic, endlessly cantering piece of Terminator dub, with gaseous billows of guitar and keys erupting and receding above a relentless train-track ostinato. It’s somehow spacious and claustrophobic at the same time, and feels longer than ice ages whilst also being far too short. 

Hive's real wild card though, the hoverfly in the bee swarm, is the trumpet. The opener 'Artemis' uses chintzy synth notes that sound as though they’re being picked up on long wave, but it’s the descending horn line that is stands out, sounding like something from James Last (imagine the joys of the albums Post-Rock-A-Go-Go, or Non-Stop Techno Kraut Party). On 'Æther' the mournful trumpet is lost in a synth miasma, and it’s a close cousin of Jean-Michel Jarre’s funereal space-sax workout, 'Last Rendezvous'. Whilst Jarre was memorialising those lost in the Challenger disaster, Teeth Of The Sea celebrate the Apollo moon landings, commissioned by The Science Museum. The track 'Apollo' closes the album, and this time dusty, fuzzy guitar is a springboard for a defiantly melancholy trumpet line, letting you know how Morricone’s 'Ecstasy Of Gold' might have sounded had The Good, The Bad And The Ugly been set in a VHS warehouse. Hive could have been a messily ornery experimental effort, but all of these very different elements tessellate like honeycomb.