Ho hum. Reviewing music can be a wee bit tedious sometimes. Every week a 'new' band arrive with their latest offering ready to blow the minds of stuffy music executives, proclaiming their relevant, politically-aware and often witty lyrics and reciting a mixture of genres, bands and movements as influences. At the moment, it's that brand of 'youf-rock' that is terribly popular, which means that the lyrics tend to be 'biting social commentaries' and 'critiques from a futureless generation, drowning in ennui'.
Bands such as The Enemy, Hard-Fi and The Ordinary Boys seem to have seized the youth of today and shown them that lyrical imagination and melodic innovation are no longer required to be successful. Au contraire! What we would all rather hear, it would appear, is a rather disgruntled twenty-something whinge about how living in the city is shit, how life is rubbish, and how everyone sounds the same (they might have a point on that last one).
The Defunct mention The Specials, The Clash, King Prawn and The White Stripes in their biog. Their Last.fm page claims that "[e]ach song is different from the last. All are instantly memorable. Some show and astute politically awareness [sic] of what is going on around them. Some will just put a smile on your face." The first couple of songs really do nothing that hasn't been done before and remind me quite a lot of The Dead 60s, a now defunct (ho ho!) band that picked up where The Clash and The Specials had left off.
'M1' opens with the call-and-response guitars that is almost considered de rigueur amongst 'indie-rock' bands, and without even seeing the band perform, I imagine the lead singer to be singing with an insouciant sneer plastered across his face, as if his mother has just asked him to do the washing up. It's energetic and it's obvious that the guys can play. It's just that it becomes nearly impossible to tell their songs from anything by any of the other bands doing almost exactly the same thing at this precise moment.
In fact, after the first couple of tracks, and realising that there were still three more to come, I should admit that my life was looking rather rubbish. And then 'Atomic Youth' came on. This is quite possibly the 'astute politically awareness [sic]' track that the Last.fm entry talks about. There's mention of snipers, nuclear strikes, governments, social uproar, war and so on. It feels like the vocals are delivered with a bit more interest, a bit more pathos, a bit more life. The lyrical content is nothing new, but it's a nicely executed song that shows that the band do indeed have one or two remotely individual ideas. Starting off with a hyperactive, scratchy, what sounds almost near-eastern or levantine drum beat and a simple acoustic guitar.
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It feels sparser than what has preceded it, and it's all the better for it. The layered build up that follows is nicely judged and the final minutes contain what appears to be an incitement to riot, aimed at the youth. The lines 'we're shallow, we're hollow but we won't follow' are delivered with mantra-like repetition, giving the impression that this demonstration is already on the move.
And then we're back to the 'youf-rock' by numbers. 'Carnival Lions' finishes with a merry-go-round fading out, and 'Urban Warfare' sounds like a Clash tribute-band. Nothing terrible, but, with the exception of 'Atomic Youth', nothing particularly great. Unfortunately, far from being "instantly memorable", I had to continuously replay the four other tracks just to remember what they sounded like. It would have been a rather average five out of ten, but I added an extra star because I liked 'Atomic Youth'. And it's got a nice picture of a dodo on the CD. But mostly because I liked the song.
http://www.myspace.com/thedefunctuk
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