A New Orleans nightclub, an excitable uncle on Christmas Day, a Victorian carnival, a jazz musician literally melting into the floor of a stage, a different, more contemporary carnival, a cartoon character being chased, a choir of clowns banging symbols as they sing, the North Korean army marching on acid.
These are just some of the images that you may find yourself conjuring up when you listen to ‘Cousin/Grandma’, the glorious opening track on Perhaps Contraption’s ‘Listening Bones’.
It sounds as if the band has each been given two instruments to play while juggling a couple of vocal parts. If this doesn’t sound like the most fun that you could subject your ears to then don’t bother. Pack up your bags and find a singer/songwriter that just, like, you know, feels pain. Or you could stay with this and have a riot.
There’s brass, strings, woodwind, God knows how many kinds of percussion – no guitar riffs, but this rag-tag cluster of chaos clings together and works, somehow.
When you are dealing with multiple band members – there are nine – it can be difficult to pull all the parts together and maintain coherence. The skill of the band as musicians should not be underestimated then.
In terms of contemporaries, there are elements of We’re From Barcelona – another epically upbeat multi-member band that were popular on the festival circuit, but other than that Perhaps Contraption are out there on their own.
‘The Ossicles’ has elements of African rhythms with jazz flute. ‘You Bring Out the Savage in Me’ sounds like a Baz Luhrman film about the Russian Revolution. A dreamily mind-bending cover of Radiohead’s ‘The National Anthem’ is the most conventional track on the album.
The band have described themselves as an ‘art punk marching band playing dada-inspired twisted surreal pop songs’. Yeah. That sounds about right. The album does have its faults: listening to it is hard work, it requires a bit of effort and dancing to it is likely to result in injury.
Some albums just seem to fit a mood, or a place – this does neither, so what is its aural environment? The musical vignette ‘Listen’ just seems pointless, and ‘Drugs Faith’ veers into self-parody, but forget all that. By the time the slow-paced ‘Dig’ abruptly closes the album you’ll feel as though music has just slapped you in the face. And that’s never a bad thing, is it?
Release on Novermber 3rd through perhapscontraption.co.uk
Posted by Kevin Scott.
