I guess you don't know BEARDS. They usually dress like this, with their implausibly bright-coloured skirts and tops, their headscarves and their bank robber masks. So please don’t worry. Claire Adams plays bass and "big neck-drums", Kathyrn Gray plays analogue keyboard-drums and despatches "vocalised anger" (vocals), while Mathew Dixon plays electric lead guitar. The headscarf suits him very well.
Mixing Akron Ohio weirdness with Yorkshire diy sanity, BEARDS have a home cooked album here of real quality. It's out on vinyl from funky new micro label Ouse. It could be Drive Time music, but it probably won’t be (more's the pity). The track of that name, like most of the others has a very cool guitar riff. Do you know that CAPTAIN BEEFHEART tune "Sun Zoom Spark" on The Spotlight Kid? That's the very one I thought of the very first time I heard it, and Beefheart would be an excellent reference point from which to enjoy BEARDS. Not that BEARDS ever torture their guitarist (as far as I know). It's the happiness in eccentricity and the fine sounding sounds that appeal to my Peel-educated sonic palette.
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The eleven tunes are short and snappy, tempos are brisk and time signatures are subject to fluctuation. The general feel is punchy, funky and spiritedly upbeat. Even if Kathryn does lay a claim to "vocalised anger", it comes through the mix as more gleeful hedonism that anything seriously aggressive. You even get a bit of lurchy sleaze on "Tried Searching (Searched Trying)". With minimal ingredients, BEARDS have generated maximum riot on a memorable ear bomb of an album.
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Ouse Records
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