This one has been sitting in my CD tray for a while now. The pleasantly gnurly sounds on their own haven't been making a very clear statement. So I've ducked away from writing it up. It is very well played and produced, and it trips effortlessly through hardcore, punk, metal, melodic indie and stoner in a manner that us old "progressive music" fans from the early 70s would find pretty comfortable but not exciting.
The blurb and other reviews indicate some sort of grand thematic development over the 45 minute running time – one instalment from a trilogy of one man's descent into madness.
Well, I'm not sure I'm buying that. As anybody who wants to know already knows, it’s Biffy Clyro's Simon Neil with a mate. They style themselves as "Dragon" and "The Atmosphere". It's a side project with lots of fun and games and no need to stick to the tightfitting Clyro last.
Captains of Industry from Durham (Hell is for Heroes, Future Ex Wife and Kinesis) pressed 4,000, so they were expecting a lot of Biffy fans to pick up on it. This is hardly "limited" in these tough times. So there might be some left, and I definitely wouldn’t warn you off it. The freedom they allow themselves makes it a lot more interesting than your usual niche rock outfit. Sketches and part-tunes abound.
I have enjoyed hearing it go through its paces. There are eighteen tracks, rolling across three named sections: "Explodes", "Implodes" and "Corrodes". The mood seems to get darker as it goes on. But I can’t say I had noticed that until I read about it. The stoner and hardcore audiences will get gradually less grumpy in the last six titles I guess. And the indie crowd will drift away somewhere about track 11, with a rather minor intro to an otherwise catchy light-voiced tune that wouldn’t sit ill in a Snow Patrol set. All the titles are mostly all a bit silly. But "Fridge and Fromage" is a good riffy backing track for something else that could be great. "The False and the Cinematic" is good furious screaming yelping skinny rock. "Piggary and Peccary" could be a Pink Floyd outtake, or a piece of cool incidental music from Spinal Tap. "An Eagle and An Eye" and "An Impostor and a Magician" are both pretty good little songs.
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The Concept Album was never a good idea (not that this really is a concept album).The ones that we remember would be just as good without the tenuous links, and the duller ones have been lost without trace. I think it’s best to think of this as a refreshing side project that shows that at least some musicians in the narrower confines of genre music can do a lot more than their fans expect (or want) and the results can be liberating.
What I really don't like is the half-pretence – the shabby (jokey?) attempt at mystique-creation that depends entirely on letting some people feel stupid once they have worked out the story. It would have been more honest to knock it out as a Christmas bargain for the true fans, with the truth about it’s origins plainly set out. These are 18 ideas for development – with two or three tracks standing out. When (if) they've finished the third CD in the trilogy there should enough material to create the foundations of a really not bad proper album.
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