London is a ghost town. Everyone is at Glastonbury. Everyone it seems, except for the weird and wonderful Russel-Brand-Eat-Yer-Heart-Out big haired Bright Young Things who filled the musty old basement of Hoxton’s 333 (not 666, which perhaps would have been more appropriate given the evening’s clientele).
This night proved to be the absolute antithesis of your average indie pop disco, with classic underground 1960’s psychedelia, bebop, and bass-driven ballads from the 1950s. And this was before the bands got started…
First up was the Bradford based JOHN JONES & THE BEATNIK MOVEMENT, who without trying, made the Horrors look like cute little teddy bears.
They were utterly nonsensical, scary, technically amazing, and quite simply brilliant. Hearing their music was like peering into the mind of medically-deprived schizophrenic in the midst of a seizure. Funnily enough, their erratic use of time signatures and atonal musical arrangements had a few members of the crowd jiving as if it was a tea dance. The evening was turning positively Dadaist.
After 30 minutes of anxiety-inducing neurotic primitivism, we had a break with some more belting tunes from the DJ. The crowd started to swell with expectation for the following act, the VILE IMBECILES.
The NME previously described Vile Imbeciles’ debut album ‘…Ma’ as: “Unlistenable unless you happen to be skinning a woman alive to make a cat suit”. Now our reasoning is that if the NME - the ‘Daily Mail’ of music - thought Vile Imbeciles were awful, then chances are they're actually quite good. Perfect rule of thumb– if the NME hate it, we’ll probably dig it.
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The Vile Imbeciles have combined the extremes of death metal with free association jazz. The raw and visceral end result is a nihilistic wall of incomprehensible noise – the perfect accompaniment to any Jackson Pollock painting.
Their sound is absolutely atonal, with the beats and timings changing so monstrously fast that you felt as though you’d stuck your head inside a blender. But you have to appreciate how insanely accurate you’d have to be to keep it all together, and throughout their discordant mess, the Vile Imbeciles were tighter than a gnat’s ass.
Like ghoulish passers by who slow down to view car crash victims, there was a morbid fascination with the Vile Imbeciles - a general unspoken urge to get closer to the stage, despite the grating noise and the very real risk of sonically-induced brain damage.
But beneath their black, aggressive belligerence lurks a sharp intelligence that is at odds with utterly everything, with commercialism, aesthetics, melody, you name it, and herein lies the appeal.
Ok, so it’s not easy on the ears. Or the brain. But conceptually speaking there are rich pickings to be had – even if it might truly be pretentious bollocks.
So dive in, take a swim, but make sure you have a wash afterwards…
www.myspace.com/vileimbeciles
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