Reviews
MELON ENEMA (EP) – EAT ME
Eat Me do catchy songs. Songs that you can’t stand still to. Songs that conjure up the feeling of last day of term house parties complete with drinking, whooping, laughter and messy jumping around. This is a good thing. “Liar” exemplifies this most and is certainly a stand out track on the EP along with “The Pledge”. Both of these and title track “Melon Enema” (with clap-claps and all) whisk me back to my halcyon university days of the very late ‘90s and early ‘00s when the world was my oyster and my life stretched out ahead of me like an infinitely achievable promise that everything would ultimately be alright, whatever was being thrown at me at that very moment.
“Boy” and “Big Love” feel like something of an evolution for the band from previous work and certainly show that they’re definitely not two dimensional and stuck in their ways in what they do, as if that was ever in question. Personally I like the loud and fast ones but that’s because I’m a simple man with simple pleasures.
If you’ve got the option and a record player, get the album on vinyl where the depth and warmth of the sound quality is, unsurprisingly, definitely superior. If, like me, you don’t have, just bang the songs up as loud as your headphones and eardrums can bear.
BISCUIT BEARD (SINGLE) – FRAU POUCH
Sometimes you need 9 minute post-rock voyages of discovery through a vast musical landscape. Then other times you need raw, visceral tracks stripped down to the bare necessity of what they need to be to still function. Despite making me feel slightly queasy at the thought of a biscuit, crumby beard getting all moist in a cup of tea, Frau Pouch’s latest offering and precursor to a new multi-track release, once again brings the goods. In many ways it’s simple, certainly not overcomplicated in structure, but that is the strength that Frau Pouch plough - like an After Eight mint, one of their tunes is never enough. It’s a classic example of a song that, although seemingly throwaway, demands listening to a few times in a row.
WAVES IN THE CLOUDS (EP) - ELEUSIA
I briefly got carried away thinking about writing this review in a similar funky psychedelic style to that which Eleusia bring to the party with their “Waves in the Clouds” EP….but I don’t think intense guitar solos convert well onto writing on a page.
With nods to that heady era of Hendrix, Cream et al, Eleusia prove themselves to bring something to the party for those yearning for a head nodding, toe-tapping fiesta of music that throughout made me picture Rudi – the jazz fusion guitarist and High Priest of the Psychadelic Monks from Mighty Boosh, sat on his small section of Woodstock – especially during final track “Dancing To The Night” which did feel like it was leading the EP away and into an evening forest somewhere warm.
