The Cesarians
- Flesh Is
Grass/Woman
Label: Imprint Format: CDS, 7"
 Hailing
from Hackney, The Cesarians
have been
packing out gigs for a while now, their
frenetic live performances assuring them of a huge cult following (I
thought I had a huge cult following once; unfortunately it turned out
to be a typo. When he caught up with me he kicked my head in). So
it's interesting to see how their filthy, booze-drenched mayhem
translates to record. Interesting, and pretty damn cool, because their
Weimar punk sleazefest seems to have worked just as well in the
studio, as witness the two tracks on this, their debut single.
The
first track, "Flesh
Is Grass", starts off timidly enough, then builds and builds into what
sounds like Kurt Weill beating
the shit out of Jacques Brel
with a
bottle of whiskey. Or possibly it's Brel who's doing the
shit-beating, with Weill his hapless victim - it's hard to tell,
especially when you keep getting distracted by the instrumentation,
which contrives to sound like there are a lot more of them in the
band than there actually are in real life. Which isn't studio
trickery - live, the combination of trombone, clarinet, piano,
drums and vocals somehow sounds a lot, well, bigger and more epic
than you'd imagine. If the Tindersticks
were to do a bunch of PCP and
somehow manage to get their hands on a time machine and go back to
30s Germany, and sneak into a club and get into a fight, the band on
stage would probably sound, to their angel-dusted ears, something a
little bit like this. Think of the World/Inferno
Friendship Society
if they lost their Dead Kennedys
obsession. Or something like that.
The
other track, what
us old bastards might quaintly refer to as “the B-side”, is a
much brasher affair, all sleazy brass and stomping swagger, bringing
to mind some of Foetus's more Steroid Maximus-y moments, only more
organic. I could almost imagine Firewater
doing something like this,
round about the time of The Ponzi
Scheme, though it doesn't quite
sound like them either.
I
don't know what you'd
imagine a band featuring ex-members of, among others, Penthouse, Christian Death and Monkey Island to sound like, but I'd
be willing
to bet a large sum of money that you wouldn't imagine they'd sound
like this. Which is why it's GOOD that your imagination is wrong,
both because I win the large sum of money and because The Cesarians
are pretty unique in music today. All these comparisons I keep making
are only very vague and tangential, like I can't quite find a box to
put them in, just a couple of shelves on which they might fit more or
less comfortably. Which is the way a band should be.
Considering
I only had
two words in mind when I started this review, and they were “grimy”
and “troubadour”, and I haven't actually used either of them,
it's pretty good going. Buy this single, and bask in the tarnished
glamour and decadence of The Cesarians. If there's any justice,
they'll be huge.
-Deuteronemu
90210 just
before the Nazis arrive and close down the club-
|
Crystal Antlers - Crystal Antlers EP
Label: Touch and Go Format: CDS
 From
the Comets on Fire school of
sunshine-and-reverb-addicted,
everything-and-the-kitchen-sink meltingpot psych come Crystal Antlers,
the band with possibly the most unjustly off-putting name of the year.
If you’re interested, the contest for the band with the most deservedly
off-putting name of the year is currently a dead heat between Does It
Offend You, Yeah?, and the Ting
Tings. Anyway. Despite sounding like
they got their name from some internet random indieband name generator,
Crystal Antlers are definitely worth a minute of your time, if this
self-titled EP is anything to go by.
Opening track “Until The Sun Dies (part 2)”
melds crunchy garage guitar
with oh-so-sexy organ riffs and breakneck drumwork, the raspy vocals
are given the obligatory reverb treatment and everything is buried
under a swathe of fuzz – so far, so Comets on Fire. But Crystal Antlers
aren’t a straight rip-off: everything on this little record is more
tightly regimented than than anything Comets have released. So while
Crystal Antlers do mix their influences with gleeful and soulful
abandon, there’s less chaos and a more consistent groove present here.
However, all the squalling freakout guitar and howling vocals, doomy
moments, soulful interludes and proggy tangents that you could possibly
want from a 25-minute EP are jammed in, along with some unexpected
treats – like the lurching time shifts in “A Thousand Eyes”, the
realisation that beneath all that organ, penultimate track “Arcturus”
is basically a hardcore song, or finding out that their drummer is
called Sexual Chocolate. A
six-song psychedelic stocking-filler, just
the thing for the fuzz fan who has everything. And, of course, the
promise of an album on the way, due early next year.
-Anton Allen-
|
Monotonix
- Body Language
EP
Label: Drag City Format: CDS
 Israeli
rock bands – I’ll bet’cha can’t name two. I’ve got a theory that
countries with compulsory military service always have rubbish music
scenes, because there just aren’t enough bored kids hanging around to
start bands and go to gigs and buy records and scare old people and all
that. The little buggers are all too busy doing press-ups, being
shouted at, scrubbing toilets with toothbrushes, and so on. On the
other hand, small out-of-the-way music scenes, with little in the way
of overbearing history or entrenched support structures, can sometimes
spawn a mutant: a beautiful snarling monster that springs seemingly
from nowhere, owes nothing to anyone and follows none of the rules.
This is what Tel Aviv has produced in Monotonix.
Their anarchic
approach to live shows is already the stuff of legend, and effectively
saw them kicked out of every venue in Tel Aviv. But Israel’s loss is
our gain, and Monotonix can now regularly be seen in cities up and down
the country, eschewing stages and security in favour of a more
(literally) hands-on audience experience, starting fires and breaking
shit and generally showing the kids how to party as if we could all be
drafted, or killed in a hail of Quassam
rockets tomorrow. There’s no
pretend-walkoff-followed-
by-preplanned-encore
here; Monotonix shows usually end when there’s nothing left intact to
make noise on.
The
6-song EP Body Language is
just a little taste of that mayhem – big
hairy fuck-off 70s guitar riffs, snotty vocals, loads of fuzz and more
bottom-end groove than you could reasonably expect from a band with no
bass player. And if the drums sound a little bit like the dude’s
banging on ice cream containers, well that’s a small price to pay for
capturing this sense of fervour and fun on record.
Hopeful
monsters like Monotonix generally survive just long enough to howl at
the moon before they melt back into the ooze from which they came. But,
with an album on the way, there’s every sign that Monotonix will here
longer than that. A good thing, because this little EP is just like a
free sample of crack, or Ben & Jerry’s – it just teases you and
leaves you wanting MORE, LIKE THIS, RIGHT NOW.
-Anton Allen-
|
3
Daft Monkeys
- Go Tell The Bees
Label: 3 Daft
Monkeys Format: CDS
 I
don't know if it's just the stuff I've been hearing, or if it's a
general trend, but for some reason there seems to be a resurgence of
all things raggle-taggle. Maybe it's the Eastern European influence
thing, and since Gogol Bordello
people have suddenly remembered there are people playing these weird
things called violins, but it certainly makes a nice change to hear the
folky element coming to the fore again. I mean, I know it does every
few years, but it's always nice.
Well, it is when it's done well, anyway,
and 3 Daft Monkeys
certainly know how to do it properly, only this is much more of a
Western folk-music type thing. This is kind of reminiscent of the early
Levellers stuff (you
know, the
stuff before they got all big and everyone said "I like their early
stuff" - this sounds a bit like that "early stuff" that everyone liked,
A Weapon Called The Word
and
so on). And like that, it's very catchy. Probably the best track on
here is "Social Vertigo", a duet with a nice almost-polka intro
suddenly turning into a
spinny-round-by-the-elbows-oops-don't-drop-your-cider campfire stomper,
on which the vocals seem to slip alarmingly close to sounding like Half Man Half Biscuit's Nigel Blackwell at times, which
gives the whole thing a nicely almost-but-not-quite cynical edge.
Although
the closer "Astral Eyes" gives it a run for its money, with nice spacey
flute and a violin that manages to do that thing stringed instruments
do which I'll never quite get my head round where they sound like there
are about four different people playing them. It sounds like there
are
a lot more daft monkeys than just the three credited, without losing
the intimacy that the first three tracks have built up. So
yeah, I'd
say the bees should DEFINITELY be told. If they find out later that
they'd missed out on this stuff, they might be pretty pissed off, and
if there's one thing that's bound to put you off your picnic, it's
angry bees.
Or maybe a bear.
-Deuteronemu 90210 pursued by a
bee- |
