Melbs’ Disco
‘In the Benelux” by My Disco starts out real tense: two Sergio Leone cowboys in a dug-heels-and-spurs shoot-out. There are twitches on faces, a fly landing in the amassing sweat of a greasy, dirty forehead. Knees bent, poncho swaying in the breeze, false grabs at holstered guns. Then suddenly the drummer shoots: but his bullet sounds like “Eye of the Tiger”. The guitarist shoots back and he’s loaded his pistol with Led Zeppelin riffs. Suddenly the drummer’s bullets are ricocheting off walls and the ceiling, his multiplying bullet-blast-beats whizzing around faster than the guitarist can keep up with. He’s shooting now: cos he likes the sound, a maniacal grin on his face. Suddenly it’s like Looney Tunes-does-Leone, all precise entropy.
- My Disco
- In the Benelux
- from Language of Numbers
- No longer available
The manic drummer gives up on this game when he realises everyone’s staring at him and his flailing. The guitarist steps up and saves the farce, delivering what will be the song’s main riff, a kind of Woodstock-via-Albini blues-rock-punk-art thing: familiarly rock’n’roll but a bit skronky all the same. Yeah, skronky. Behind this tastefully melodic noise, the rhythm section lay it down like pre-fabricated sections of piping, just like Weston and Trainer do for those Shellac blokes, keeping it moving steadily and heavily. They jam the breaks on this steam-train from time to time too, just to allay any fears of predicability.
While not as immediately impressive as the tracks on their debut 7”, this is still powerful, and serves well to introduce their EP. Buy it.
[On fourth listen now, it’s really recalling Ricaine, particularly in the Aussie-inflected-cum-accented vocals that are in the best tradition of shouted-words-from-another-room. It’s bringing forward from the musical shoebox of my brain those lines delivered by Brett of Ricaine (and Warped and Little General and Black Level Embassy): if you balance a match between your lips at a perfect angle, you can give the impression of a certain demeanour — words which ended about there and erupted into a scream of ‘she glides’. I always wanted to know what in the name of a bass distortion pedal all that MEANT.]