Late Of The Pier at ULU

Late Of The Pier at ULU

21 July, 2008
by: Evolmike

It's no secret that art is in a constant state of rebirth, and nowhere is this made more apparent than in the quantum jigsaw of modern music. The nineties housed the seventies renaissance, the eighties housed the sixties and so on. Yet the naughties so far have been reluctant to settle on the eighties, but rather provide a festive gumbo comprised of the most marketable ingredients from all of the above.

Late of the Pier (and to a lesser extent, Video Nasties) are testaments to this pan-generic casserole. Video Nasties walk the dizzying tightrope that is the oxymoron of "disco-punk." Battering drums and hydraulic stop-start riffery, fused together under a wave of coarse, jangling reverb. Seemingly innocent lyrics bundled into the brain-curdling screams of irreverent stage angst. It's visceral - not necessarily raw, but medium-rare, and at times impersonally discordant, reflected (or should I say refracted) by their decision to wear tights over their faces. From a historical perspective it all seems fairly original, but then there's a lot of this sort of thing going about on the London scene. A smooth peg rammed into a rough hole and/or vice versa.

This sojourn into the realms of juxtapositional genres served as quite the appetiser to the sonic circus that followed. Late of the Pier are one of the few bands who really earn the original definition of the "indie" label. They are simply impossible to pigeonhole. Bubbly synth orchestra hits morph into stabby, foot-stomping funk. Curious swathes of psychedelic staccato organs suddenly erupt into a storm of gabba rock. Dramatically sustained squeals can be heard soaring over crunchy house basslines like a suspiciously aroused clanger playing sonic the hedgehog in the dark. No sooner has the guy in the sleeveless, new-romantic T-shirt abandoned his post at the electro-cheese-babbling station to bash planks with a stick... than the guy in the baggy, futuristic, silver tunic breaks out the maracas and starts running laps around the stage. In short, expect the unexpected. Although one gathers from the offset that the unexpected will be expected, so... expect to unexpect the unexpected expectations and you might just be able to keep up.

It is difficult to draw comparisons on such an eclectic smorgasbord. One imagines a very young David Bowie howling sweetly over a coy Lemonjelly romp. There is almost a complete absence of repeated motif here. It's one melody after another, rendered and structured like a neon yellow jenga stack of bitesize disco chunks, all sharing one sacred attribute - That of the profoundly and adorably silly.

The mind boggles to think of what future generations will do when they get hold of this and make it even crazier. It's only a matter of time before all music is part of one gigantic magic eye picture in which the hidden image is even more inconceivably hectic than the Jackson Pollock experiment concealing it.

"Hooray" I say.

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Evolmike