"The sound of the underground". That's how Brainlove Records have chosen to describe their compilation "Two Thousand And Ace". The word is that the Brainlove bods release the sort of weird shit that very few other records labels will touch. A heartening approach to the freedom of music, it must be said, because it means that we get the charmingly odd "I Heart Labrador Records" by Jam On Bread and Slag Rabbit's "Fleur-de-Lis", a kooky mashup of synths and guitar. Unfortunately, it also unearths such ridiculously awful tracks as The Retro Spankees "Smarty Pants" and Pseudo Nippon's "Constellation Jebubu". The latter, beginning with geisha harmonies filtered through a gameboy, proceeds to distil everything bad that the most racist of westerners could imagine - cooing "ucky ucky ucky" Japanese school girls, 'Engrish' vocals, Pokémon wailings - and rams it through the listener's eardrums for a full three and a half minutes. It's of course meant to be cute, a self-conscious parody of everything that we expect of Japan and its at times intriguing culture, but it falls well short (the Channel 4 show Banzai did the whole Japanese parody thing much better in any case). The Retro Spankees' contribution, on the other hand, suggests that their modus-operandi for writing songs is to take the supposition "I bet I can make an annoying noise" and run with it for one minute and thirty-four seconds (it feels interminable at that). A song of the "naa naa ne naa you smell" variety (I bet you can't see me/'cos I'm really really small"), it blurs the line between avant-garde and crap to near unseen levels. And that's not all, unfortunately. Icelandic trawler urchins Æla, with their rickety track "Hommar", bump it all up a notch by throwing acid-drenched bemused ravings and feedback into the mix. It's not a particularly winning formula, but mercifully it's all over in under ninety seconds. Apparently they met on a commercial fishing boat and promised to form a band if they got back alive. How different the 21st century's musical landscape could have been... The common theme running through this compilation is "ramshackle". Everything about it screams lo-fi shambles, as if the band members had never met before picking up their instruments. And it's not all guitar-based anarchy either (although there is a lot of that): Genevan kitchen sink pop band Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp ("Afrogarage") has an infectious skitty energy about it, and features a great last minute of jungle-like cacophony, trumpets, modulated guitar wailings and all. It's just a shame about the frankly dire vocals. And the Holy Fuck sounding offerings (and in particular "Milk Shake") from Cats In Paris ("And Ugly") and Pagan Wanderer Lu ("Good Christian Bad Christian") make for a bit of variety. The former, anarchic bedroom prog-pop from Manchester, forces a mish-mash of squalls, squeaks and what sounds like dog torture on tape (whines, barks and yelps) through a blender. The whole thing beeps, throbs and blarts like a BBC computer in a washing machine before rather collapsing in on itself. Like a BBC computer in a washing machine. It's not without its charm, in any case. Pagan Wanderer Lu takes bedroom laptop fiddlings and adds a bit of wiry post-punk for good measure, creating a flash of dissonant pop, brimming with skittish energy and dead-pan lyrics, like a neon-coloured, low-budget LCD Soundsystem. Keyboard Choir ("In This Situation, Thinking Won't Help!") close off this diversion with a grimy apocalyptic doomsday dance-athon, a foreboding car crash of processed beats and bible-bashing fire and brimstone fury. It's really rather good. Ratface's snarling street-hop, all crunchy guitar and sneer, is also a highlight.
And then we pass out of the nightmarish vision of North Sea fisherman, animal cruelty and broken electrical equipment, into a world of quiet and peaceful beauty. Empty Set's "Your Hay Fever", a bucolic slice of folk-pop not unlike Peter and the Wolf (the Austin incarnation), complete with violin, desert-island ukulele and bird-song, is sweet and ridiculous in equal measure: "I didn't know if it was your hayfever/or me that made you cry/Oh, I'll never know/but I hoped it was me/at the time". The vocals are reminiscent of a toned-down Zach Condon, Gulag Orkestar-era, and it all makes for a delightful respite after the initial eleven tracks. And speaking of ridiculous, next up is the incredibly twee sounding Jam On Bread with "I Heart Labrador Records", a ode of the most gentle of gentle pop to the cult Swedish record company. There is very little sillier on this album than the passage in which Steve puts his demo rejection down to the simple fact that "I'm not from Sweden/I'm from Grimsby/separated from Sweden/by the North Sea." It may not be for everyone, but it's quirky, laughably ridiculous and not a little bit charming. Apparently the record label liked it, noting in their news section that, and in your mind's eye, you really can see the Swedish spokesman looking a bit bemused when he wrote it, "it's a really nice little tune".
After this little trundle through the countryside, we plunge head first into a three-way pile up of club-nite thrashings-about, with Tim Ten Yen ("Radio Nowhere Theme" - little more than a minute of disco-fused pop), Evenings ("Maybe It's Too Late" - fidgety indie-pop, like Dogs Die In Hot Cars without the ceaseless energy combined with a less nerdy Hot Chip) and Modernaire ("Science", a shimmering fusion of scuzzy 80s-tinged electro, slinky female vocals and bitcore squelches) bringing the beats. The latter in particular is nicely done, even if it does at times veer rather too close to the Eurythmics brand of synthpop. The already mentioned "Fleur-de-Lis" by the charmingly named Slag Rabbit is one of the compilation's stand-outs, taking a pulsing synth melody and throwing in Strokes, Is This It-era, garage guitars, topping the whole caboodle off with eerily haunting noises of an indistinguishable provenance. And then we come full circle, stumbling, mad-eyed, back upon the turmoil of the opening tracks. Junkplanet 2 have opened for British anarchic noise merchants Fuck Buttons, and it shows. Although lacking the Bristolians' blisteringly destructive force and nonconformist tendencies, Junkplanet 2 still manage to find time in the one hundred and one seconds of noise they create to throttle, in a blaze of feedback, the life out of their offering of semi-melodic chanted loops and delicate acoustic pickings. Picking up the baton sees Gay Against You's "Magic Eye" play a game of find the song. Squint you ears enough and you might find something in this fifty-seven second flurry of gameboy melodies, glitchy electronica and messy guitars, but I wouldn't count on it.
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Stepping around Pope Joan's council estate casiotone glitch pop ("49 Years Time") and we happen upon Ace Bushy Striptease's "Michael Kightly Is Pretty Rad", the most shambolic forty-eight seconds masquerading as music that I've heard since Pete Doherty abandoned his Carl Barât safety net and set off on his own. It's a ranting, po-faced "ode" to Michael Kightly, an English footballer currently plying his trade for Wolverhampton Wanderers (probably a first, I imagine). It's another bizarre, wilfully messy contribution that does little to alter the impression that this compilation celebrates above all the tenet that songs lasting longer than four minutes and sounding like they have actually been practised before being recorded are for Coldplay lovers and other such musical pariahs. The compilation serves up enough music to keep the NME popout box full for months. It's positively overflowing with the sort of music that has those irritating indie brats (no doubt bitching because they're still not old enough to buy a pint) squealing with delight as yet another three-piece band (formed two minutes ago in the venue's toilets) are hoisted onstage to deliver a frothy-mouthed rant, backed by a tune played by "musicians" whose sole musical experience consists of having once played the recorder with their nostril when they were six. That's not to say that these bands here (with one or two exceptions) are awful. It's just that after twenty-odd tracks of flibberdy-jibberdy rackets that sound like they were either recorded in a lunatic asylum or a shed, you end up craving for something a bit more structured, a bit more paced and a bit more... well, thoughtful. And then up pops Capitol K with exactly that: "Cumbia Millipedes" is a rhythmic French bistro slow-dance, a languorous late-night groove of fizzing percussion, glistening water-drop synth notes and jaunty accordion. The description that emerges most frequently in information about Kristian Craig Robinson, the artist behind the music, is IDM, which always appears to me to be a bit offensive, as if the intimation is that other music is somehow not intelligent. Capitol K's presence on the compilation is a bit incongruous though, as if having forced the listener to plough through fifty-odd minutes of carnage, Brainlove suddenly took pity and threw in some brief respite. What follows however is a duo of quite staggering oddness: "In My High Heart There's A Fox Dying", from Alice Music is not so much a song as a decidedly twee female-voiced round exercise. It's irritating and somehow manages to be tiresome without actually going anywhere. And then The Oracle's "Sunny Graveyard" does nothing but sound like a car alarm, albeit an harmonious one, going off in a rainstorm. A synthesised vocal soundscape, it spectacularly succeeds in being less of a song than almost everything else on this compilation, an impressive feat in itself.
The longest track on the CD is Dead Singer's "Finger", a rather draining live track of forceful riffing, a barrage of drums, and experimental rock trombone (really). Whilst everything else has been almost ludicrously short (some of them mercifully so), this pummelling instrumental (hence the Dead Singer moniker) could have been trimmed slightly, weighing in as it does at a soul-destroying seven minutes plus.
So, overall, what to make of Brainlove's offering? It's not particularly balanced, and could definitely do with some pruning. Careening crazily between maelstroms of ramshackle guitar bashing and lazy, soothing slices of indie-pop (with plenty in between), the variety is there, even if the quality control isn't always. And yet, get past the stubborn and persistent belief that anything more than plugging in the guitar, let alone such wildly ludicrous exercises as band practice and tuning, is selling out, and you'll find some interesting, charming and at times highly enjoyable nuggets of low-budget pop. Just don't expect anything longer than four minutes (with the one notable exception). Or a guitar solo.
Brainlove Records
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