Wholeskymonitor: 'Bland Bland Bland'

Anybody who takes such a clearly venomous attack on the prominence of the banal in modernity, and puts it all over their album title and sleeve art (a series of photographs dealing with themes of isolation and alienation and overlaid with angry quotations criticising consumerism, godlessness and falsity) had better be pretty confident that their music does not itself contribute to the overwhelming tide of miserably inadequate tripe that they affect to disdain.

Wholeskymonitor call themselves ‘existential kitchen sink dramatists’, a comfortingly verbose description, even if it does say nothing more glamorous in reality than ‘shoe-gazers’, and the music is raw and punchy, with two guitars leading the fray. First impressions serve the group well - they sound original and authentic, and appear to be uninterested in playing the games of meeting genre expectations. What is on offer can only be characterised as rock, but it is of a desperate, even bleak strain, drawing on the post-punk innovators but without being sound-alike, copycatting or reinventing the wheel.

'Cinenema' opens the record, with a gradual build up of the various drum and guitar elements, that feed into one another and lead toward a satisfyingly tuneful resolution. 'Mary Moses' is classic garage rock, with a tuneless raving at its core, that flips between keys at an alarming rate. The track virtually foams with a well articulated desperate howling. 'Three Cheers For The Weirdo' fluctuates between angry little flecks of guitar, with John Parkes’ hoarse and angry voice tempering the slow burning development until he, and the music, explode into choruses of vitriol and pumped up staccato rhythm. There are confident strides into noise at the fringes of the track, but they are not high up enough in the mix. The formula strays toward traditional punk sounds on 'Sick Sick Sick', which has a proper pop chorus and a lyrical countdown with efforts at agit-prop humour (‘3-4-5-6-7, all politicians go to heaven’). The sheer bleakness of the vision is appealing and draws in a keen listener.

The album’s title track is a joy, and the place where all this anti-consumer rage finds its most effective articulation. The three word chorus (well, the same word repeated three times) oozes anger and resentment, even if it is undermined by that age-old problem of the band’s being part of the process they despise. 'Internal Critics 4' is as close as we get to a big tune, and it is pleasing.

This album is patchy and over-long, with too mystifying an array of themes to really sit completely, but the raw aesthetic and intoxicating punk anger really does grab the listener, and the experimental ear in evidence is a real draw.

Released on 10th December 2007 by Firebomb Radio.

Written by Huw Green.