Fuck Dress - 'Suburban Nietzsche Freak'

"God is dead, so I listen to Radiohead."

Quite so. How refreshing once in a while to find an utter throwback of a tune like this. Here we are with a slice of indie back from when that degraded word ever meant anything. This has surely wormed its way through a rent in the fabric of time from 1985. (Perhaps Radiohead were actually named after this lyric then?) The label of the day is In Tape Records. The Fall are going through one of their periodic spells when they are fashionable and it's cool to acknowledge their manifest influence on all music (these moments are interspersed with long spells where everyone forgets about The Fall, but they keep working regardless). Yeah Yeah Noh are putting the fun back into being pretentious. The Membranes are the next big thing. The June Brides are surely going to change the world. And all records sound like this: thin guitar, robotically thudding drums, and two singers, a deep-voiced male and an accompanying female, apparently stood too far away from the microphone. Things are recorded in sheds, and sound like it. The lyrics are alienated, knowing and not afraid of wearing their smartness on their sleeves.

Yep, I like this, like it a lot, and I'm going to listen to it 27 times and then file it away for the next 10 years before rediscovering and being confused by it. It currently exists only in non-physical form but is due a real release from NROne records - no idea of the capitalisation there, it's a guess - sometime next month, and you can pre-order it (not an expression I have ever understood) there. Nrone has become one of those quietly good labels which most of the time gets it right. Inevitably there's a Myspace site, which rather shatters the illusion that it's 1985, when we were all using ZX Spectrums, and there are other tunes knocking around the internet, none of which, inevitably, are as great as this.

Yet another fuck band, by the way, in what's getting to be quite a collection, but it's becoming a bit boring to keep pointing this out, isn't it?