Late of the Pier - Fantasy Black Channel
Rating
RIYL
The RaptureRadio 4
Justice
Pendulum
Release Date
01/13/2009
Label
AstralwerksTracklist
1 Hot Tent Blues 1:162 Broken 4:11
3 Space and the Woods 3:44
4 The Bears Are Coming 3:23
5 Random Firl 2:14
6 Heartbeat 3:02
7 Whitesnake 3:01
8 VW 2:27
9 Focker 3:14
10 The Enemy Are the Future 6:01
11 Mad Dogs and Englishmen 3:00
12 Bathroom Gurgle 7:14
13 Very WAV (bonus track)
14 The Bears Are Coming (Emperor Machine Remix) (bonus track)
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Late of the Pier's story is an all too familiar one: Band releases handful of limited but popular singles; band bubbles away in the melting pot of the underground; band then gets picked up by the NME and other hipster-hype zines; band continues to stew and savour, collecting juices for a short while until they're popular and tasty enough: band are now ready and are brought to the boil; band finally spill over with the hype and out and into the mainstream.
So... if the hipster hype wasn't enough to put me off this band, their unbelievable snobbishness was. I caught these guys on the Nokia Green Room TV show, which is a one-hour-long kind-of Big Brother-type show for bands. It gives light to some up-and-coming acts, but also features some big names – in this case Kelly Rowland, Pete Wentz, and Ashley Simpson - and you get the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing them all mingle in the 'green room' shortly before they go on-stage. Late of the Pier thought they were too cool to be there, and were generally being all-round arrogant and appallingly obnoxious. Obviously too lofty to speak to such a person as Pete Wentz, their disdain for him was painfully apparent (although later they claimed to not even know who he was), and their dickish behaviour caused tensions to gradually escalate, finally - and ridiculously - getting into an argument over a Bon Jovi song. After not being able to admit Bon Jovi's “Living on Prayer” is a great song, the band left to go perform, leaving a flummoxed Pete Wentz to deflate and asking Simpson, “Is this British humour?” Nah, it wasn't. Pete had just got a first hand experience of snobby British hipsters in action. This wasn't an isolated incident, either. Youtube is a wealth of their douchebaggery.
What I find ironic is, while the band take themselves far too seriously and are clearly too elitist to admit enjoying a Bon Jovi track, their music clearly owes and is influenced by all the cheesy nu-wave and nu-romantics music of the same era – and the same music that can be found in my mother's vinyl collection: The Human League, Duran Duran, Sparks, and Gary Numan, to just name a few, can all be heard here.
While Late of the Pier's music has retro traces, on a whole it falls under the modern tag of the 'dance-punk' banner, but what sets this act apart from the other dance-punk/post-punk revivalist bands of a similar ilk such as The Rapture and Radio 4, is the band doesn't just run quickly through a pristine collection of slick dance-floor anthems, which arguably they are, but there is some genuine experimentation to be found here, and the album is a large collage of genre-spanning sounds.
Opening the album up with an intro of booming tub-thumping and bombastic space-age synths, its comparable to the futuristic-rock of Muse, which continues on into the next track, “Broken,” with its classic dance-punk swagger, only with those synths following along for the ride. There's also traces of nu-rave to be found here, although their fans will fight you to the death trying to convince you otherwise, but you can't really blame them for trying to shun the seriously 'uncool' and ill-fated genre. However, the comparison is unmistakable, as on tracks like “Space & The Woods” and “White Snake” video game synths and frenetic guitars electrically pulse together in similar fashion to nu-ravers Klaxons and Hadouken!, but they excel where those bands all went wrong. Where this band excel even further is the fuzzed-out electro-clash tracks the band dabble in. The jangly, percussion-heavy “The Bears are Coming” and the screaming “Focker” are both comparable to the recent Daft Punk-aping of Justice, Innerpartysystem, and Does it Offend You, Yeah?'s jittery dance floor electronics, but probably with even more chart potential.
The point I was trying to make with the philippic nature of this review is, this band would've had to release something pretty remarkable for me to be able to look past their potent obnoxiousness.... and in all honesty, they have. Late of the Pier have all the ingredients for you to hate them and are the soundtrack to a Hipster's wet dream, and they unfortunately know it, but they must be commended for not missing the mark and falling into the same cheesy 80's dance/post-punk revivalists as The Bravery and She Wants Revenge do. They've done something fairly remarkable in collating a lot of great sounds into a digestible pallet. As much as this pains me to say it, while this band are indeed massive douches, they have made one massive record.
--Rich Taylor
Comments
Baltimore, MD
wow, i'm honestly shocked to find this review on decoy, and that it was given a pretty good review. Love this album quite much...and Focker is one of the best individual songs I've heard in some time.
Must say though, not sure were the Pendulum RIYL is coming from. That's almost like saying any electronic based artist is similar to LOTP.
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Minnesota
These guys should tour with Bring Me the Horizon. It could be "The Douchebags of Music" tour.
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