Skimming the curd and waste from the milk of desperation and domestic violence may not be everybody’s idea of a good time, but for the perennially Bristol-based Experimental Pop Band, scouring the bus shelters, service stations, arcades, council houses and dredging the rivers for all the miraculously ordinary things that happen in life has become something a cause célèbre.
Originally on City Slang records through which they released the albums ‘Homesick’ and ‘Tracksuit Trilogy’ the band are now in the equally secure bosom of Cooking Vinyl, home of similarly skewed eccentrics and pop firecrackers like The Minus Five, The Wannadies, Camper Van Beethoven and Frank Black. And a more sympathetic environment you really couldn’t get this side of a circus.
Discordant, muted pianos, stumbling breakbeats and harmonium sound effects make up the wry and chilling ‘Retro Folk Suckers’ whilst a montage of squealing guitars and humming percussion make up the equally witty ‘Weekend’. The Blur inspired faux-punk debacle ‘Gothenberg’ may seem a trifle unessential but the savagely sexy ‘The Hippies Don’t Know’ more than makes up for the occasional filler. Parping Herb Albert horns and fizzy, distorted riffs drag up favourable reminders of Edwyn Collins and Space’s singularly ambitious ‘The Female Of The Species’.
The band may court genre-swapping with the same cheerful abandon of a queer at a ‘Xena: Princess Warrior’ convention but it makes for a pleasing, if unpredictable listen: electro on ‘Can’t Stand It’, Breeders-style garage on ‘Fantasy Studio’, trip-hop on ‘Rock Bizz’ and even lounge-core jazz on the dreamy beatnik ‘Crow Venture’. Stephen Jones and Babybird may have covered much of the ground already on album’s like ‘Faherhood’ and ‘The Happiest Man Alive’ but I personally never tire of songs about drunken student parties, mothers in tracksuits, razor blade showers and last years fashions from T K Max. In fact, it’s the brutally quotidian nature of the subject matter that makes it so appealing. It’s a universal to anybody who has ever lived in England (which is by it’s very nature, I guess, not universal at all). It’s wonderfully regional, lets leave it at that.
Anyway, I am not offering any kind of closure on this release as I simply haven’t stopped liking it yet.
So there…