Devo a la Nippon, anyone?
Polysics are self confessed Devo-tees. But their music is not Devo-by-numbers.
Not by a long chalk.
For sure, the influence is there in the construction of the songs but Polysics are so much more than that.
This album compiles songs from their 4 or 5 albums and numerous EPs (mainly released through Sony Japan) – a kinda ‘Best Of’ or ‘Introduction to’ I suppose.
There’s something about the way Japanese bands use Western Pop, bastardise Western Pop, transform Western Pop.
It’s been talked about so many times before that I needn’t bore you with the details. Needless to say this album excited me from beginning to end. There’s the rush of Melt Banana at top speed, the sonic blasts of Merzbow when the sun’s shining, and the bangs, shouts and yelps of pleasure spread across Jap-Pop hooks that make me want to jump up and down.
I’d never heard Polysics before, but I’ve been instantly converted.
The nearest Western Pop band that comes to mind, if you want a marker for this record, is probably Ultrabra.
Topping the whole thing off is a vocoder driven cover of “My Sharona”. It needs to be heard to be believed.
Absolute noisey pop bliss.

Now this was a surprise. I was convinced before even hearing them that I’d dislike them. In the same way I knew without a doubt that I’d dislike Franz Ferdinand.
How wrong I was.
The music is bright and clanging and crunchy and exciting. The half spoken vocal does begin to grate by the end of the record, but the lyrics are by turn funny, clever, interesting, ridiculous, which kept me listening.
There’s little else that you need to know about this record. The hip kids will love it as it fits snugly into the current mode of “chic” guitar pop and the anti-hip kids should love it for the great guitar pop that it happens to be.

Fortuna Pop’s compilation EP More Soul Than Wigan Casino is a 4 tracker featuring Kicker, Comet Gain, Airport Girl and Butterflies of Love doing covers of Northern Soul classics and murdering them. In fact the the whole thing is an exercise in irony, given that the bands involved rip all the soul out of the originals while pursuing their ambitions to sound like the back end of the C86 movement. And I really mean the back end – I’m talking The Secret Goldfish and Bambi Slam rather than McCarthy and The Wolfhounds. Perhaps it’s just me being a purist, stuck up prig, but if you’re going to make music in an idiom from the past then you should be doing it with verve, not just make carbon copies of what’s gone before. There’s no need to do 80s indie like the darkest depths of the Apricot label when you can do it like Spearmint or The Free French. Hate mail to my usual address, thanks.

Egon’s All Theory and No Action is very clever indeed. Those of you who know me will know of my intense dislike, bordering on hatred, of Nirvana. They have a lot to answer for. Like helping mundane MOR rock get lauded as “legendary” or “classic” simply by playing quietly on verses and then LOUDLY on choruses.
Egon use this same tactic, but, and it’s a big but, there’s something about the construction of the songs that pleases me. Is it the organs draped all over the mix? Is it the Central American accent singing in hushed tones? It’s certainly not the songs per se. There’s nothing particularly new or inventive there. But the way the songs are carried off is startling. Hidden away somewhere in the mix is the out-funk of Liquid Liquid or The Contortions. Not that this is a funky record, quite the opposite, but the soul of the Neo York Disco scene bubbles away underneath and simply lifts this record out of the rock mire and into the “you really ought to listen to this” category.

It Stings When I EP took me completely by surprise. I think I was expecting to be mildly disappointed while having to listen to half arsed post post rock but no. How dare a band I’ve never heard of not sound anything like their cover art and rubbish record title suggest.
How to Swim are, if anything, part of a new movement that I’ve just made up.
How to Swim are ‘Post Vaudeville’.
From the opening operatic boom of Bones, all slightly discordant chords fighting swathes of brass and a singer coming on like Nick Cave on cheap Rye Whisky, through the cleverly constructed Bhundu Boys (yes really, Bhundu Boys) riff of There’s a Building There, this EP uses a host of styles while maintaining a logical progression for the players in the band.
And there’s a lot of them.
200 at the last count.
OK, perhaps not 200, but there’s a lot of them.
I like this EP a lot for two reasons:
The sheer audacity of the sound that the band create to complement some really quite clever song writing, and the fact that there’s so many of them that I daren’t say anything bad.