Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Monochrome Set

I've got another review up at Dusted today, this one of the very fine, very odd debut by the Monochrome Set, reissued three decades plus later by Water Music.

Strange Boutique, the 1980 major label debut from a band that will forever be associated with its offshoot (Adam and The Ants), begins in a stew of jungle sounds and a relentless pounding. “Monochrome Set (I Presume)” is still, 30 years later, the band’s calling card and the kick-off to its live set. It’s an idiosyncratic blend of punk aggression and new wave suavity, a Dada string of surrealist imagery set to irregular bursts of guitar jangle and syncopated drumming. “Monochrome Set (I Presume)” resides at the spikier end of the band’s continuum, more jitter than swoon, but still altogether too florid to really fit into early 1980s punk. It’s an intoxicating combination of eloquence and brute force, manicured and ironic but also explosively chaotic.

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Here they are older but still pretty compelling...in 2011.

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