Late Of The Pier: ‘Fantasy Black Channel’

Produced by super hot DJ Erol Alkan, Late Of The Pier initially feel like a continuation of the punk funk zeitgeist instigated by Franz Ferdinand among others - indeed there is something of Alex Kapranos’s ironical tones in singer Samuel Dust.

However, following a handful of clamorous singles with this debut 'Fantasy Black Channel', we can experience the group’s dalliance with the long player format and realise what should have been obvious; that there is a great deal more to them than that.

It opens, rather bizarrely, like an early eighties pop act doing a spoof of 'Master Of Puppets'-era Metallica and quickly establishes itself as a work of much greater imagination, worthy of the lavishly redolent cover art. The opening synthesizer riff of 'Space And The Woods' veers dangerously close to Gary Numan’s virulent classic 'Cars', but due to the band’s restlessness it doesn’t linger on this one motif, instead visiting many planets of fuzzed up bliss, while during 'The Bears Are Coming' they turn their hands to percussive innovations. (In the song’s rattling breakdown, there is the unmistakable sound of teaspoon on ceramic cup.)

Of this youthful, dangerously vigorous music this much needs to be said: it is essentially punk attitude informed by three decades of progressive rock, electronic and dance music and funk. It is a sound that, at times, resembles nothing so much as a dense, knotted forest of hard bass-lines, bombastic percussion and battling guitars and keyboards.

Unwilling to contentedly settle on any one style or musical sequence, sometimes even over the duration of a single three or four minute song, the band burn the bridges they cross in a tremendously excited fashion. In this style, riffs that could make up whole songs on their own appear multifariously at the end and in the middle of songs. Late Of The Pier tear through 'Fantasy Black Channel', fit to burst with more ideas that occur in the average mind over the course of an average band’s entire career.

Released on 11th August 2008 by Zarcorp / Parlophone.

Written by Richard Wood.