Tobacco - Maniac Meat Album Review

For www.catchthesonics.com

By Ryan Pilot

Meat is the word. This record is thickly layered with meaty, big, dirty synth sounds. Deep, distorted, motorised whirrings grate across the entire album like speeding cars, driven by big, gritty hip-hop beats.

‘Maniac Meat’ follows Tobacco’s 2006 debut album Fucked Up Friends and it grinds straight into life in fifth gear, with ‘Constellation Dirtbike Headache.’ Rumbling, distorted rock ‘n’ roll bass and a synthesised motor melt into modulated, laid back vocals over trashy drums and you are instantly seduced by the lead synth hook. You can hear the dirtbike revving throughout, which somehow comes out of a human mouth midway through.

Guest vocalist Beck reels through imagery on ‘Fresh Hex,’ like experimental Jewish hip-hoppers Clouddead. He flows over hip-hop beats and synth bleeps that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of electronica twiddler Clarke’s records.

‘Mexican Icecream’ offers a creepy juxtaposition between angelic, childlike “do do dos” and Ladytronesque harmonised, male vocals worshipping the Sabbath, singing, “You are the favourite day / I’ll bring the sun to you,” over an electro beat. ‘Sweatmother,’ a sparser affair than the rest, refreshes the ears with high pitched high hats, 90s power-rock drums and whispered vocals to a Robot Rock-style guitar riff.

‘Unholy Demon Rhythms’ pumps some life back into the album, after a brief lull, with a drum fill. The bass drum rumbles like the Devil’s stomach ache while the tom-tom whips like the Devil’s spitting as deep detuned synths claw their way upwards from hell.

On ‘TV All Greasy,’ the rushed, clumsy kick drum beats like an irregular heartbeat, laced with stressed out synths. ‘Creepy Phone Calls’ concludes the album, a ghostly hook drops in unexpected and demands you pay attention. A real stand-out track, it sounds like The Stone Roses being playfully abused by a bored digital demon-kitten.

Tobacco has created a creepy, catchy, glitchy, filthy violent attack of a record which delights and stimulates the ear and confuses the pulse.

Mystery Jets - Dreaming of Another World review

For www.CatchTheSonics.com

By Ryan Pilot

Frontman Blaine Harrison thrashed away on kitchen utensils, looking like some mad scientist with his wild white hair, when Mystery Jets first appeared on the scene supporting Arctic Monkeys in 2006.

His dad was in the band then, fifty-five-years-old, he stood at the back and let them all live at his home on Eel Pie Island, the location for the Rolling Stones' first gig and former hippy haven, in the Thames.

They've recently streamlined and ditched the eccentricities. Where once they played strange experimental sets they now produce three-minute pop nuggets. They have a slicker image and dad Henry Harrison no longer plays with them.

Latest single 'Dreaming of Another World' is no different. From its sweet guitar intro through its whirling synth hooks and uplifting key changes, it's a catchy, heartwarming slice of pop right through.

They continue to show aptitude for writing perfect, simple rhyming couplets like "Spend my days in a dreamy haze," and their obvious, sincere and deep love for pop music beams through to keep them head-and-shoulders above cynical indie-pop throwaways like The Hoosiers and The Kooks.

There's loads in this song. It's thickly layered with hooks, like a catchy Cure hit. It is crafted with the sort of care and nurturing that has allowed Mystery Jets to develop from their talented but diverse and unsure beginnings into an exciting and accomplished pop act.

Klaxons - Flashover single review

For www.catchthesonics.com

By Ryan Pilot

Glow-in-the dark indie mystics Klaxons are back after three years in outer space to enlighten us with their latest audial offering.

New single ‘Flashover’ screeches and scrapes into life as a thickly layered industrial pounding, with sparse guitars warning of approaching peril. The rolling drums and clean guitars have something of The Arctic Monkeys’ latest work while the keys rise to bring the sound of the Horrors into the mix.

The single sounds like an indie version of War of the Worlds as singer Jamie Reynolds reports “Myriads of signals” that “have been noticed on the drifts,” and speaks of a flash “from our new neighbour,” over Cooper Temple Clause-inspired electro-indie beats.

So far so good, it’s urgent and exciting. Then from nowhere comes some piano plonking straight out of Bohemian Rhapsody. Over this West End interlude Reynolds warns, in a voice not too far from Jason Donovan’s Joseph on Lloyd-Webber’s ‘Close Every Door to Me,’ that “dimensions of time have come undone, now we have become so un-alone.”

It’s either a flash of humour or the band taking themselves too seriously as inter-galactic prophets. The problem with the Klaxons is that you can never tell if they’re taking the piss.

All-in-all the pioneers of “Nu-Rave” have created a dramatic, glorious noise underpinned by driving beats. Flashover remains catchy and delivers the mystical warnings that we love them for. Though you can’t help wondering if the real warning is that the world’s first indie-rock opera is on the horizon.