THESE NEW PURITANS – Now! Pluvial EP (Angular)
Posted: April 4th, 2007, by JGRAMI discovered this band by accident last year as the sound of their Myspace page came ear bleedingly pounding up from downstairs in the publishing department of my workplace. My gut reaction was that this was the sound of The Jesus Lizard jamming and crashing into Einsturzende Neubauten, I had not heard a better band in five years. Apparently.
With further inspection of these true children of the Myspace age I found more delight in the fact that these kids hail from Southend in Essex (my heart my Essex) and their photo shots just make them look ugly, reminding me visually of My Bloody Valentine at their best/worst. This truly looked the perfect package. Whether long term parking will see such a buzz maintain is another question but for now I am happy to feast on what I think I have found, I have found like.
Correct me if I am wrong but this is their first venture into a proper release and obviously it is on the most defiant of formats: the seven inch single. I wish I could say releasing records on vinyl was the sure fire method of keeping your tracks off Soulseek but I have to admit before I had bought this single, I had downloaded the tracks as MP3s. Even today when I put this release into an Ebay search to see how much of an investment the record has become, all I find it a “DJ copy” – aka a plain CD of these three tracks.
And these are three tracks of a purposely awkward kind. Who can fault a band whose opening track is called “Elvis” and features distorted vocals Mark E. Smith would be impressed by. The bass led ritual is as dirty as middle class kids can afford to come, distorting the truth of their apparent dysfunction, there is a lot of solace to be taken from these times. “C16th” follows as a typically difficultly titled song tapping into the post-punk jerk sound that has maintained its hype over the past few years, the redeeming difference here being the way the drums manage to dictate proceedings. Track BB “En Papier” is the death defying song that originally captured my attention with it’s end of the world exploits as it plainly just sounds like kids being tortured and kicked to death by musical instruments in the most angular and disorientating fashion of recent memory whilst still remaining coherent. If this is the kind of intensity and inventiveness the band can maintain we have a major new band to admire.
Thesaurus moment: convincing.
JGRAM
JGram, friend of the stars, chartered accountant and pie enthusiast, likes nothing better than KICKING YOUR SKINNY ASS by way of a carefully-timed half-nelson followed by the CLOTHES LINE! OW! So never, never cross him. His dog Snowy is equally rockhard and will bite your lim bs off in the blink of an eye. And then paw your eyes out for blinking when he's biting you.