Email | LiveJournal | MySpace | Last FM
The
Fucks
White Heat Club @ Madame JoJo's, London
Tuesday February 13 2007
Like
all the best weirdos, they look reassuringly normal. The
Fucks have a throwaway name (let's face it, it's hardly shocking
these days unless you're a Daily Mail reader, and are thus pre-programmed
to be horrified at everything) and a neat line in slightly nerdish stagewear.
They look as if they've arrived at the venue fresh from the university
chess club.
The fact that there are only two people on stage drops a hint that we're not in for a set of four-square conventional rockisms, and sure enough the band set about generating bursts of oddly-angled noise in which implacable basslines try to pin down wayward bursts of keyboard and guitar.
Somewhere under the noise, pop songs struggle to get out. Fortunately, The Fucks' latent tendencies towards poptasticness are always kept in check by their somewhat less latent tendency to do the weird thing. Ducking between keyboards and guitar, the female half of the band lets rip with a vocal pitched somewhere between Diamanda Galas-style opera-isms and Polystyrene's punk-pop foghorn.
Meanwhile, the male Fuck keeps those basslines plugging away, standing stoically to one side as if he's trying to be sensible in the face of gathering madness. The guitar lines shred like the band have taken instruction from Ygnewie Malmsteen, and it's all gloriously right in its wrongness. It's as if The Fucks pushed pop music off a cliff, and then picked up the shattered fragments and reassembled them to their own improbable blueprint. The university chess club won't know what's hit it.
Essential links:
The Fucks: MySpace
For more photos from this gig, find The Fucks by name here.
Email | LiveJournal | MySpace | Last FM
Page credits: Review,
photos and construction by Michael Johnson.
Nemesis
logo by Antony Johnston,
Red N version by Mark Rimmell.