Ten For 2010: Music Go Music

Ten For 2010: Music Go Music
Words: Stephen Kelly

People are miserable and you can hardly blame them. The weather, the recession, the war, Peaches Geldof, climate change, the crushing futility of life in the face of inevitable death; these are all perfectly valid reasons to be unhappy. Pop music, however, is not one of them. This is precisely why Music Go Music should be loved by everyone in 2010 but will no doubt be loathed by those who subscribe to music’s culture of cynicism. The sort of cynicism that would so easily dismiss the LA three-piece as a bunch of Abba-alike Blondie-borrowers instead of accepting them for what they really are, which is happiness incarnate. “Even from the very beginning, we saw it as our attempt to make pop music,” says guitarist David Metcalf, who also goes by the stage name of Kamer Maza, “so if we have any sort of agenda it was to create pop songs. ” That might be because rather than being ‘I Gotta Feeling’ by The Black Eyed Peas, what they’re making is massively camp, Scandinavian-esque disco-pop such as tracks ‘I Walk Alone’ or ‘Just Me’, both possessing hooks so massive you could hang whales off them. Not bad for a band that started out as a studio hobby. Lead singer Meridith Metcalf (her alter-ego is Gala Bell) and her husband David were originally in the indie band Bodies Of Water before recording their first song with the enigmatic Torg for fun in 2006. From there, it evolved from the studio to blogosphere hysteria to eventually record companies offering them, what David calls, “ridiculous sums of money”. You can see why. Their ‘crossover potential’ – as boring sods would call it – is massive. From mums to Shoreditch hipsters, debut ‘Expressions’, due later this year, could, and should, conquer all in 2010. Although if that really is the case, why do they feel the need to hide behind the stage identities of Kamer, Gala and Torg? “The work we do with Music Go Music is a specific part of our brains that we mesh together to create what we do,” explains David, “so it’s kind of like a way to name that part of us which is doing it. It acknowledges and distinguishes us from that part which was trying to fix our broken plumbing, as I was this morning…”

‘Light Of Love’ is released on Mercury on March 8th.