I’ll
be honest with you, music is bloody hard. Standard grade focused on tapping the
bare bones of common time and six-eight into either a half-mute keyboard with
too-big studio headphones or on glockenspiels with obscenities scrawled into
the wooden body. In any case, the concept was the same - playing Merrily We Roll Along on repeat for
eight hours a week wasn’t exactly rocket science.
Liverpool-based
Vasco Da Gama clearly got more out of those hours than I did. Their EP Geography is riddled with weirdness of
all sonic proportions, despite using instruments common to their field. It
starts promisingly: Brigadiers,
after a brief screech of feedback-laden guitar, introduces a young, ireful lead
vocal, who delivers his lines forcefully and boldly. The music behind him jerks
in and out, the band toying dynamics with abandon.
Things
seem a bit more typically math-rock in Powder
Post, which starts with bizarre, almost off-key staccato stabs
of twin, syncopated guitar. After this firm handshake, it heads into more of
the same energetic, but surprisingly melodic, barrage from frontman John
Crawford. In a way, it almost contrasts against the jangly post-hardcore in the
background, almost as though bringing it back into normality.
The
shortest track on the record has both the longest name and the highest
proportion of cowbell - Tonight We Will
Eat Something With Two Colours In It is
ridiculously good fun, featuring a number of distant yelps from band members as
well as spasms of extreme slapback delay from guitarist Chris Lynn. It has
probably the closest thing to a steady beat you’ll hear over the course of the
EP.
The Greenland Problem continues the
sound in the prescribed way, but seems somehow louder and more venomous than
its predecessors - this is, in no small part, down to profuse application of
distortion otherwise spread relatively thin throughout the fifteen minutes of
music. It also contains a personal favourite lyric: “when the cat comes home
with bad news / no cream, no shirt, no shoes”. So bonus points for that.
One
thing is for certain here - Vasco Da Gama know what they’re doing. They may be
specialising in a rather niche genre, but they pull it off with such prowess
that it’s no wonder they stick at it. They’ve told in interviews how they enjoy
stuff that’s dynamically interesting, and it really doesn’t get an awful lot
more dynamic or interesting than this.
Geography by Vasco Da Gama is
out on April 22.
JS
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