My Device: 'Jumbo Fiasco'

Brighton three-piece My Device just overflow with energy. The first thing that leaps out at the listener of this truncated but rich record (14 songs in just 35 minutes) is that the group are utterly loopy, indulging in heavy pounding riffs and flailing spurts of instrumentation. Vocalist Todd Jordan sounds like a more guttural take on fellow nut-jobs Isaac Brock and Black Francis, singing and yelping as though every encrypted line contains urgent information for the listener. The lyrical concerns are difficult to discern, but at least the first three tracks display a fascination with the construction of the album itself.

Powerful first track 'Geraldine' leads from the front, dedicating itself to the eponymous person with the cry ‘This is the song that we promised you’. On 'Fountain Of Youth', Jordan takes on the role of a frenetic listener (perhaps a music reviewer) intoning that he will ‘listen to track 1, I’ll listen to track 6, I’ll listen to track 9’ and reels through a long list until finding himself back at track 6 again. The trio rally round in the more frenzied moments, often coming together toward the end of tracks, as though Russell Eke’s bass and Alex Uren’s drums are deliberately trying to maintain the near epileptic frenzy that Jordan has worked himself into. It has glorious consequences on 'Super Tonio' and 'My Bear', where lines pack in words until all of the sense gets squeezed out of them and we are left with a bewildering maniacal raving that adds to the already quickening madness of the musical accompaniment.

Some of this is more whimsical. 'Rusty Trombone' is a deliciously short tale told from the point of view of a deranged underwear thief, whose perspective can only have been conjured up by someone a little unhinged (‘I…stole your garters, knew you were watching, so started dancing’), but My Device are not a novelty act. 'Slamming Doors' is intense and, at four minutes and twenty two seconds, is the grown-up epic of the album, with a much more recognisable structural progression than the sillier and shorter numbers. 'Eat Lead' is lean and post-punky, replete with sharp edges and musical dissonance. The insanity is all capped at the end with 'That Girl Don’t Got No Shoes On', which serves as a strangely fitting meditation on the ontological status of a song’s subject and somehow undermines all that went before, as we might have expected them to do from the off.

Even though it is short, the madness of this enterprise, with its consistent lyrical and musical theme of being unable to contain one’s impulses, begins to get tiring (not to be confused with tiresome). It is one of those high-octane albums that doesn’t contain a shred of respite, unusual in its consistency, but not to be listened to with the expectation that it will be instantly charming.

Released on 5th November 2007 by Shifty Disco.

Written by Huw Green.