Save Your Face: hyperventilating country songs sucked into the vortex of a tornado then spewed across a sprawling Oxford landscape, mangling traditional country and western mythologies with their twisted, elliptical word-play, their misshapen chords and laying deliberate tripwires for the listener. And then they’re off screaming down alleyways and shimmying up drainpipes like wildcats. An album that could quite easily have been sub-titled ‘fear, loathing and getting out of tight scrapes in overcrowded bars’. It’s the kind of thing Supergrass might have done had they dummied Brit Pop, nutmegged the mainstream, reined in their Stones and Buzzcocks influences and thrown away the rulebook. The Cardiacs, Brakes, Camper Van Beethoven, Devo, Victorian English Gentlemans’ Club, Sparks, Cockney Rebel – they’re all in there one way or another – squeezed like a truckload of rag and bone into a junkyard of ideas and distributed around the west country by a brigand of punkish costermongers. Improvised singalongs screamed out at random as they traverse across Middle England in their horse-drawn camper-van pitching their wares of junkyard noises. Yes, it’s easy to get carried away. Listening to The Mules is a little like getting drunk: you start off with the best intentions but after two or three pints of the stuff you’re talking unmitigated bollocks to complete strangers, forget what you’ve done with your mobile and start dancing around like an arse. So let’s just sober it up a little.
Starting out in a basement underneath a chapel in Oxford, Tim Burke (piano and moog) and Ed Seed (drums and singing) wanted to sound like a country band. But not just any country band. Tim and Ed wanted be cosmic cowboys, bashing out songs on their drums and piano by artists as mad and diverse the Band and the Flying Burrito Brothers. But by their own admission, their sprawling, eight-piece symphonies sounded like a really angry Salvation Army band. And then things got a little funkier. A little punkier. And by degrees they created something called electrobilly. It’s made of wood, glass and plastic and understands that country music is sick at heart and intrinsically anti-social. They roped in Nico Beedle on fiddle, Duncan Brown on guitar, Jim Leslie on bass and in January 2005 they issued what would be electrobilly’s first release: an EP entitled ‘Grab Your Musket’. It did well. It sold out and after a pair of Christmas singles, the band return with this; a limited-edition first full-length release: Save Your Face – a frightfully well arranged yet thoroughly illegitimate chaos, organised round madness and mayhem both, yet literally rattling with chirpy singalong chouruses (‘Picking In My Business’, ‘Tule Lake’), gentle mortuary sweetness (‘Live Feed’, ‘The Catch’) and a trailer park of scratchy guitars, neurotic fiddles, and unbalanced stop-start beats. It’s part post-punk, part new-wave and part potent cosmic energy all wrapped up in a witty toilet-tissue of social observations and graveside humour.
My own personal fave? ‘Polly-O’ – a tale from the asylum, a nightmare in the nursery, full of swinging, infectious handclaps, pneumatic snaredrums and razorsharp guitar strikes. And very much proving Ed to be a boy you really don’t want to take home to your parents for fear that he’ll have no qualms about seducing your mother, your sister, your grandmother and your dog.
Franz Ferdinand, Josef K, Gram Parsons, Bowie, Buzzcocks, the B52s – take your pick. We’re not trainspotting here. It’s just sounds f**king ace.
And what’s more: nobody’s safe….