This thing is a riot, a wonderful beautiful riot of sound. A riot of seemingly random changes in rhythm, gorgeous guitar and vocals that seem to be just there and just right.
Oh boy is ‘Fun Times’, the EP opener, funky. The obvious comparison would be The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, it’s got that funky feeling, but then again no, this thing has something of it’s own. It’s way heavy, the vocals aren’t really sang nor they are shouted, it’s just this unique style all of their own, with this rather great slurred thing going on.
And what is this, this gently plucked guitar, it’s the intro to ‘Love Yourself’. But does it carry on like that, does it hell. There’s these bursts of riffage, of noisy glorious guitar. And that gently plucked guitar is delicate, it’s strangely mood altering. And the vocals, well these are bits where there are just all sorts of vocal lines crossing and weaving. And the vocals over the outro, well you just have to hear them to believe them.
And then suddenly for ‘Games People Play’ UNCOMELY turn to delicate West Coast singer/songwriter stylee. It’s all gently strummed guitar and the sweetest vocal. But then it isn’t, it’s the heaviest thing, and then it isn’t it’s sort of rocky but not that heavy with the creamiest guitar I’ve heard for a long time. It is the strangest thing, it’s like a mutant ‘big rock ballad’. It has these touches of discordance. And it finishes on a shout, that’s right a shout.
For ‘Absolutely’ the band return to that gentle guitar and weaving vocal lines, until it explodes, it explodes with a shout, a scream, the nicest non-vocal vocal. And then it just goes back to being delicately plucked guitar.
The thing about this EP is it’s disconcerting, it throws things at you unexpectedly, you just never know what to expect, what’s coming next. And that is a beautiful thing, I just adore music that’s unpredictable and seemingly on the edge of falling apart. I love music that just throws all sorts of styles into the mix, and the tracks on this EP do that, they do it to a point of ‘what the fuck, quite what the fuck is this band doing’. But ultimately I don’t care, for what they are doing is quite quite beautiful.
The problem is that I can’t quite find anything – beyond a list that would go on for ages, absolutely ages – to say it sounds like this band, and then that band. The best I could come up with is that it’s like salted liquorice – the first time you have it that sulphur taste is unexpected, it really seems to be wrong but then it isn’t, it just works and you become quite addicted to it. Normal liquorice is nice but it doesn’t have that edge, that thing that feeds the need. That’s how I feel about the songs on this EP, it’s the unexpected that feeds my musical need.
