aaamusic | On 01, Feb 2011

Hmm. I’ve heard a good few confusing records in my time. Enter Shikari’s debut, Icky Thump by The White Stripes, anything by Dillinger Escape Plan, but this… occupies a space entirely on it’s own when it comes to oddness, because what it seems to be is a standard rock song stuffed with an enormous amount of other stuff, namely, a recorder playing its main hook, a guitar solo that goes on for a good three minutes, a stylophone bursting into the track after the second chorus like a startled duck, and then a didgeridoo shows up, basically unaccompanied, for the last minute and a half of the track. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up. But the oddest thing is that this baffling experimentation is stuck on to a relatively straightforward, Dessert Sessions meets Dandy Warhols three chord stomp. Which gives an odd sense of familiarity to the proceedings, which in turn, makes it all the more weird. It’s a vicious cycle of strange that entirely distracts from the song itself which, I’m sad to say, is probably for the best.

Once you get past the “what the shiny hell is that!” novelty factor of the track, there is a pretty uninspiring song underneath it all, it plods along, singer Pete Bradley never particularly exerting himself all that much, which gives the songs eccentricities a nagging feeling that they’re not much more than gimmicks. So in all, listen once for the sheer, batshit lunacy of it all, perhaps twice if you really can’t get your head around it, but then avoid.

Author: Will Howard