A Good Demo

This week I’ve been listening to some unsolicited demos. Or “doing my job”, as it’s also known.

Now, the post bag is a cruel mistress. Actually, if I’m honest, that’s total bollocks. She’s a whore. A knickerless STI-laced whore, too, with no concept of loyalty. On a daily basis she just dumps all sorts of rubbish on you that you have to try and DEAL WITH. But, every now and then, she gives you just a glimmer of how great it COULD BE by giving you something INCREDIBLE. What a bitch. What a gal. Etc…

I’ll be honest, in the past I’ve committed some grossly unfair acts (this incident in particular springs to mind) via the medium of blog, when we’ve been sent some total bobbins-or-other. So, it’s only fair to report when we get sent some REALLY GOOD stuff too, eh?

Now then, the reason for writing this blog are Illness, a guitar and drums two-piece from Brighton, who have sent me their ‘Broad Money / High Heat EP’. Pleasingly, they have put immense effort into ensuring that their demo arrives on my desk in the most eye-catching and charmingly home-made state. A bit of lined paper has been torn out of a notepad and Pritt-Sticked over the plastic window in the paper CDR sleeve. On both sides of it, they have potato printed a green star, a blue cross and a sort of a red blob thing. The fact that they’ve hand-written the tracks onto the sleeve, and sent me an accompanying shoutily-written note in big orange letters, is encouraging.

In the music, however, they are far less wordy. In fact, to paraphrase a Fly writer of old (who we got rid of largely due to his saying what I’m about to type), there aren’t any lyrics, or even any words. It’s instrumental experimental rock music. And it’s bloody ace. ‘RECORDED, MIXED & MASTERED BY BRIDLE @ BEAKER ST. STUDIOS 01/09’ bellows a bit I’ve just found in green pen. It might as well say ‘MADE IN A SHED FOR 8P’. It sounds like it. The undulating, tempo-shifting tinnyness of opener ‘Paper Cut’ is so exciting and choppy that you have to keep reminding yourself there are only two musicians playing. Obviously, I want to whack this in some kind of pigeonhole, but it really doesn’t bear comparison with a two-piece like No Age or an instrumental band like Explosions In The Sky. It’s too inconsistent in its makeup. Not inconsistent meaning bad, just inconsistent meaning as soon as you think it’s doing something you can understand, it’s off gallivanting in the total opposite direction with such reckless glee and abandon that you’re left hopelessly in its wake. The only criticism I can strain myself to find with it is that it sounds a bit like a band who’ve been stripped of a bassist and a singer. Despite that, it still somehow adds to their charm. ‘River Cottage Industrial Complex’ is not only a brilliant name for a song, but also an expert guitar lesson from whichever of the green-pen wielding maniacs makes the guitar noises in this fucked up twosome. The melody in the guitars is as brilliant as anything Dananananaykroyd have done. And to cap it all, ‘Three Bridges’ is easily the best experimental instrumental lo-fi noise-math-rock song under two minutes long ever written about a shit train station in the Crawley area. And the drumming is brilliant. So, er, well done chaps. Illness are SICK. ARF!

Visit Illness’ MySpace here.