Male Bonding
Barfly, London
22/06/2010

To say Male Bonding are not the most easily embraceable band doing the rounds at the minute’s probably something of an understatement. After all, a certain totemic flair notwithstanding, with his crikey-but-Camden’s-rubbish rhetoric, frontman John Webb displays an almost-Nicky Wire-y knack for audience-baiting, while it wouldn’t be unfair to point out that he’s also got one of the most commitedly diffident relationships to the concept of melody that we’ve seen in quite some time. Nonetheless, their fearless blend of abrasion and abruptness demands a degree of admiration and, ultimately, a little affection too…

Conceptually, for instance, they’re an extraordinarily sound call, clawing heartily at the carcass of indie in its ferocious ’88 incarnation in a fashion that takes tendrils from the primal proto-grunge of the era and ties them unorthodoxly to the hypnotic lostness of the contemporaneously re-emerging acid rock (making them Dinosaur Jr viewed through the refraction of the Telescopes, if you like). Although that makes them seem much more calculating than such an instinctive showing would suggest. Bassist Kevin Hendrix, for example, much as he subscribes to the art of combining lo-fi with hi-velocity, cuts a curiously relaxed swathe through the chaos, while drummer Robin Christian positively pounces on every single song with the zealous recklessness of a Muppet brawl.

All of which adds up to an audacious and aberrant spectacle that may not always convert but never fails to convince. Yes, their obvious distance from the haircut rock hordes erupting from their metallic straitjackets at present’ll doubtless doom them to constant commercial eclipsing, and we suspect they’ve got more than a handful of riveting riffs still to unleash just yet (though ‘Year’s Not Long’ and ‘Franklin’ are a terrific start on that score), but it’s a fearsome fertile furrow they’re ploughing. If they can just stick with this, a lot of love could yet be theirs for the taking.

Iain Moffat