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 Everett True

The return of Everett True | 28. Arponera

The return of Everett True | 28. Arponera
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Another drawn from the fast-becoming-legendary Facebook tip-off concerning Barcelona and bands and wonderment and spice. (Check back over the last couple of posts for the others.)

I had a press release written round this somewhere – downloaded for free from the BandCamp site, alongside this wonderment of music – and I was going to translate it and quote it and look all smart, but damn it if I ain’t lost it, and if the music ain’t distracting me so much I just want to get straight down to the nitty-gritty, the nitty and the gritty, the fucking HEART of this music, with its stunning occasional xylophone and Casio (I think) and piano and rattle tambourine and smart, sardonic lyrics I can’t understand a single word of, with song titles like ‘Hepatitis’ and bottomless ants (that’s the British version), and sharp, insistent, urgent, draining vocals, and clatter of percussion. It drones. It is devotional. It is electrifying, the way that all bands who pass the Electrelane test are electrifying. It has edges, and colour. There is repetition in this music and we’re never going to lose. It.

Circular, the way all good saws are.

Inspirational, like autonomy.

Bitter, like spring.

My source has it that this sounds “like Raincoats or Malaria! singing traditional Spanish music. The lyrics are specially brilliant”. I can’t vouch for the latter, or even part of the former, but this sounds more like New York 2007 than my dark Teutonic sweethearts from the early 80s, or (well, duh) my Rough Trade tender-hearts. Damn. It is most definitely a female form of music. Sure, I’ll split music down gender lines if the rest of the world insists on doing so and claiming only bands that play like men are any good. Effi Briest, that’s the band I was looking for. Don’t be mad. Don’t be scared. Don’t be mad.

Oddly enough, in the discourse from Plan B Magazine around Effi Briest in the above link, Malaria! AND Raincoats were cited. So… well, life is like a fucking massive saw with fucking massive teeth and sooner or later it’s going fuck you up.

Here. It could apply. Except it clearly doesn’t. Apologies to anyone still awake.

Seven females playing visionary macabre DIY from Brooklyn, entirely written in palindromes about the literary experiments of the Oulipo – swirling like The Raincoats, early avant DIY punky like The Door And The Window.
Louis: Wow, this totally reminds me of something, but something good – Defunkt, or Malaria!
Everett: Malaria! were far more Gothic.
Kick: I like the percussive tangle of it, but it also has sudden Patti Smith lapses from open and exploratory to hairy and old-fashioned rockin’.
Everett: It swirls and whooshes and acts tricksy in a spatial way.
Louis: It’s got that brambly, ethno sound that Gang Gang Dance has, but with quite a robust, funky groove holding it together. I like it very much.
Everett: I like it very much also.
Kick: Guitars veer toward bombast, but there are enough sparks of otherness to keep it interesting. Did anyone catch any of the palindromes?

I miss my ladies more than anyone could possibly dream.

Photograph: Swab Art Fair (who say, rather wonderfully)

Arponera is a young trio made ​​up with the components of Cierzo and Tu Madre, listening to their songs is like telling ghost stories at night time with your class mates when you’re eight years old, you are sleeping in a gloomy attic, as the perverse use of a lullaby in a psychological horror movie, and even as those hasty between teenagers fascinated by the rotten makings of nature and the invisible. They opt for ripping the skin to melancholy and leave to the open air songs that, even though you might not think it, do not recur to the rawness and rudeness, but to a sweet darkness, with lyrics able to make you feel an atavistic fascination, primitive and nearly unexplicable.

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