Full Metamoono Jacket

It’s the night of the much anticipated Metamono album launch party and with two highly sought after tickets in my grubby mitts I head off into the night. Forecast torrential rain hasn’t appeared (it’s happening now Sunday afternoon as I write) and there’s a beautifully clear night with near full moon lighting up the few stray clouds drifting by. Gorgeous. Meet Simon on the train en route to Crystal Palace and after necking the canned G&Ts he’s thoughtfully provided we trek up the hill from the station. Catching our breath we stop at the pub at the top for a swift one, or three thirds in Simon’s case, and to catch up on life before music and socialising. Then a wander to Bambino coffee and second hand curio shop where the gig is bumping into one of the band outside. Paul’s wearing a white lab coat which Simon says makes him look like a butcher which doesn’t impress. I keep my counsel which is that he looks like a 70’s Hawkwind fan as not sure if that will be taken as worse than a butcher or not. Into the shop which is heaving with folk chatting loudly around the Instrumentarium with Mark stressing that us punters will spill beer into the synths’ valves and puts an extremely effect barrier in place, duct tape on floor, to stop us. I receive my hand delivered deluxe 180gm vinyl bespoked sleeve copy of the album from Jono and then after some dandy geezer standing on a box shouts the Metamono manifesto through an acoustic megaphone  the band are on.

For a longer review see the one of a few weeks ago in Norwood as unsurprisingly it is pretty similar. However tonight the crowd seem a lot more up for it and the band hit the high spots and get us all dancing a lot sooner. We seem to be feeding off each other and pretty soon there’s a whole lot of skanking and shaking going on to the big techno dubby beats and synthy bleepery. It's pretty hard core and trippy in places and and with visual weirdness going on too I half expect Nik Turner to leap out blasting his sax. So maybe the white coat was a nod in that direction after all. There’s no enforced intermission unlike last time out so we're bopping right the way through the long set until the crowd demand what I think is an encore tho it’s hard to tell as there’s no room for the band to go off stage if there were one to come back onto. They finish a great set to tumultuous applause and much back slapping and all’s left for me and Simon to do is to chat at length with friendly folk who Simon seems to know most of and I get to know. Including a Gooner from Lewes with who I share our delight at the goal of the season scored a few hours earlier by, well, half the team really. Very enjoyable evening all round and as we’re walking back down to the station I’m a little concerned that I’m finally getting into electronic synth heavy music. A bit like I drifted into enjoying jazz at Latitude. And I'm reading The Time of Our Singing and wondering if I should give classical opera a try. What on earth is happening to my punk sensibilities. I’d hate to think I’m growing up and maturing. After Simon leaves me at Streatham Hill I resolve to play my old scratched Exploited Punks Not Dead at high volume on the Sunday but instead I find myself listening to my new double deluxe album interspersed with a remixed dub version of Black Uhuru that Jono put together and gave me years ago as thanks for lending him Red for educational purposes. It’s been an odd week music wise after seeing Wilko Johnson on Monday dressed in a black suit with shaved head playing 70s pub rock stripped down band of guitar bass and drums then Metamono another three piece with a guy in black suit with shaved head playing 70s influenced electronic rock stripped down to analogue. The average age of both audiences was about the same but Metamono certainly had a lot more dancing and energy in the crowd despite being squashed into a shop with small bar (i.e. collapsible table) and one toilet. Both brilliant in their own way; see last post for godlike Wilko review. Cheers band boys and bar girls for a great night.

Paul Conboy in action

Left hand side a synthesiser, probably, right hand side a theremin

Writing this watching the lightning and heavy rain listening to the record which hasn’t quite the energy of last night's gig but is wonderfully chilled for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Oh god I’m enjoying a full on synth band and I'm gonna have to download some Can. My daughter’s verdict of weird sounding like Super Mario in space (a commercial opportunity there boys?) is not way off the mark but a result of too much X Factor. She found the Uhuru dub CD easier to dance to, Jono. As I’ve not said a lot about the band's gig last night I’ll include a review of the album which is my first so be gentle with me. I wrote it before the gig when listening to the download and it seems to have Trypnotism and Slippery Jack flipped in order. So if one of the track reviews is way off it’s because I’ve written all the right words but not necessarily in the right order as Eric M said to Andrew Preview...

With the compliments of Nuclear Physics. 

Unable to control my anticipation I download the album before I get my greasy paws on the vinyl at Saturday’s album launch party. I plum for the bog standard iTunes compatible MP3 spurning the urge to come over all hi fidelity with FLAC or Ogg Vorbis which sound suspiciously like virtual or real viruses to me. Not being a synth music expert or even a fan in usual circumstances this review may be a little off kilter and having read a few on line reviews I’m not sure I’m cut out for reviewing a genre I know little about. I'm also embarrassed in advance of meeting the band members again if I've slighted their music or written crap especially as my musical talent stretched to French Horn grade 3 and playing Peaches on the bass and not all of it either. The temptation to plagiarise more learned reviewers was thwarted as I either didn’t understand what they were on about or I failed to keep up and got bored reading. I didn’t have either of those complaints listening to the album itself and my rock and roll sensibilities were well satisfied by the track lengths going from a Ramones like minute and a half and none over 7 minutes. Good show boys. My sort of double LP.

Uplink is a gentle introduction to the beats and blips to come. Heavy bassy rhythm comes in making my speakers twitch but they’re cheap and attached to my PC so looking forward to blasting my vinyl edition on my main hi-fi system. (Later note, the album sounds much more solid, richer and rounded played on my deck and half decent amp and speakers). Linger Langour starts with disco vibe beat morphing into dubby disco smooth before building up the high end synths into mini crescendos and down again. We’re talking the rolling hills of England rather than jagged peaks. Rare Earth Rush does as it promises with the beat pushing us along nicely and the blippiness getting more urgent it is indeed rare with vocals which I swear name check my ancestral home of Somerset. Something about a trip down there where Simon and I grew up. Maybe the Ogg Vorbis edition would have made it clearer for me. Plums and Custard gets us more into a dance hall vibe with driving rhythm overlaid with coordinated tuneful synth sound mixing it up in your mind’s eye. Get’s my feet moving and head nodding taking me back to seeing Metamono live before gently lowering us into a stop. Dare I say it but we’re getting accessible. But I guess accessible is in the ear of the listener.

Blessed Space puts a stop to all that anthemic dance nonsense and brings us back to basic beats sounding like thoroughly modern laid back dub. It livens up a bit towards the end and a bit of goat bleating in a Prince Far I stylee wouldn’t be out of place. Construct is a well constructed slice of electronica that brings us back to a more intellectual plain and the nearest to anything I can compare to namely OMD (the band, not an acronym for Oh My Days). Slenderman is a sleazy echoed swirly song with cheeky squeaky interruptions counterpointing the previous academia. La Grande Peur chills us out interspersed with shrill beeps and a riff that moves from lush piano to bass topped electronic organ.

Trypnotism starts with a darker edge before a cacophonic slice lightens things up then blends into a stride before jogging off to the end. Slippery Jack carries on running with more urgency to a regular clock blip before the ante is upped with a nod to the silliness of dance band blippery. (These are the other way round on vinyl). We get a little more mature half way through with deep throbs slowing us down before those pesky dance tunes over run us again and we tumble into a tangled dub vocal which I swear has the goat bleating I missed earlier. Deuce is the longest track and has the luxury of a slow beginning allowing anticipation of a build up into a dancing skanking beat which can then slow down and up whilst not feeling that we’re rushing around too much. Buzzy swirly sounds getting inside the head hover above the rhythm beat with each playing each other off to lead us on. Towards the end we get some classic high synth twiddling giving way to a classic driving low synth insisting on a bit of toe twitching before they both clash to a bloppy fade out. Sweet. Fezgate our 1 minute 26 second track is hardly an electronic version of Blitzgrieg Bop as I over optimistically anticipated but with old school rock and roll sampling at the start, at least the vocals, and frivolity throughout it’s obviously the nod to youth where the ephemeral rules.

This Constant brings us back down to earth with a sober fuzzy tom tom beat often sounding like out takes from the BBC Radiophonic workshop which must be trendy as I saw that at Latitude Jazz stage. The odd chatting is disarming especially over a mid eastern riff. We’ve strayed from the accessible path a bit here. Still on the untrodden ways Glowfade does just that by picking up a bit at times in a wry tongue in cheek tunefulness but not quite childish. The middle eastern influence is a theme by now and I realise that it’s a safe signposting to ways I recognise. But before I reach that I have to struggle through Just Real Enough which is either an early 70s snook at serious rock, a late 70s post punk attempt to be serious or a 10’s attempt to confound us all. I’m confounded. Stumbling back onto the beaten track I reach Funland with danceable beats punctuated by piano and happy synthy riffing and a fair bit of gratuitous banging about and Clangers-ish whistling. Was it Funland the Soup Dragon lived? Ah no, it was Glasgow. Armillaria Solidipes wraps up the album very neatly combining laid back danceable beats with brain twiddling crunchy blips and bleeps rising and falling. The electronica equivalent of shoe gazing where you can’t help shuffling your feet nodding your head and closing your eyes. This is one track that should’ve gone on for 7 minutes but in half that time it abruptly ends and silence bar the groove lead out scratching. At least that’s what I imagine I’ll hear until I open my eyes and realise it’s a Dell in front of me and not a BSR... (update, did indeed open eyes as arm lifted off vinyl to settle back into off position).

Overall an album I really enjoyed from smoothly chilled soaring to head banging beats all the while brought back to earth with strong dub vibes. As with all great records it brings back the excitement of a live performance whilst giving you something else in return for being sat in your living room rather than being in a crowded sweaty venue with a speaker deafening your left ear. The latter obviously being much more enjoyable. I would say they're on their way up and could pack out and scintillate tents full of trance techno dance fans... but not sure if they want all that glory. And they'd have to get a much bigger loud hailer to get that manifesto across to thousands of punters at a time.