Cymbal-happy and Ba-ba-da-ba-da-pa-pa –ing into your head comes the first full-length release from shambolic popsters ATTACK & DEFEND. ‘How To Build A Boat’ is as nautical as it gets, with talk of mutiny abound. Suddenly kicking into overdrive with a cry of ”Ss-setsaill”, it’s clear the punk ethic reigns supreme.
Domestic crisis? If you openly wait for your tea like the chap in ‘Any Danger’, you’ll end up with forks in your eyes. Are we being driven to distraction or abstraction – the lyrical references to gestures rather than words pose that intriguing question (actions do speak louder).
Bleeps and breaks intersperse with off kilter guitars, shouty, slurry vocals and machine gun hi-hat hammer during ‘More’, a clanking subscaling anti-spiral from the periphery of the mind’s eye.
Elsewhere, harmonies shine as meaninglessness is assessed, or apathy levels. The bad-dream realities of ‘Processwhore’ squeak and warn against rat-racing, but the noise from the speakers is all good.
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‘Drawing Lines’ is confusion encapsulated, inert psychosis mixed with boredom, atonal keys and rolling percussion. The bassline is apoplectic and beautifully sub-standard, and the whole thing is the burning brained antithesis to the early eighties ‘Choose Life’ approach, complete with concluding bad-tempered guitar flurry.
I wouldn’t like to have to pigeonhole this – where the category obsessive might (out of frustrated confusion) file it in the box marked ‘I dunno’, the genre defying mixed-message delivery frequently hits the spot during this eleven-track assault on kitsch domesticity.
Just to be obscure, there’s a book called ‘Leaving the 20th Century’ by the International Situationists. If that book came with a free flexi, then it would sound a little something like this.
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