Brighton’s Emperors Of Ice Cream are a totally DIY band who, having worked their way through other local scene bands covering noise, improv and freak-folk type stuff, have settled on the Emperors for peddling an open-minded take on the kind of wonky indie scrawl at which the British were so good on the mid to late 1980s.
Taking some of the Ron Johnson aesthetic of “no-one else sounds quite like this, why not give it a try”, they have rolled the dice and added some out-there extended psych elements to craft an album full of succinct indie surprises and sprawling mantra-like workouts.
Coming in digital form or on cassette, which appears in a hand-made sleeve featuring huge eyeballs flying low over a minimalist landscape, the album opens with “So It’s Said” which, with its wonderful blunt bass and wonky biscuit-tin drums, revels in a history of left-field independent sound. The vocal delivery is the kind of thoughtful meandering that brings to mind the likes of Repo Man‘s Bojak or Mick Derrick in a stream of consciousness that is questioning and filled with wonder. The rhythm section drives the whole thing forward like a steamroller, and with bursts of electric drill guitar to give your fillings a rattle, it is over before you know it. There are unadorned gaps galore in “Travel Time” that are then filled up with bursts of noise at various whims. It is lighter somehow, and the vocals feel as though they are being delivered with a lot of hand-wringing and eye-rolling. The group’s ornery racket is part of the puzzle, I would imagine ,and there must be a lot of seeing who blinks first and in which direction they are going to go. “Into Three Or Four” changes the mood though, slowing things down and allowing them time to build. “Today you broke into three or four” intones Sam Cutting, and his tones have a conversational ring — but it is the sort of conversation that one would have in the early hours with a comatose friend lying on the bedroom floor. It feels like a comedown after a questionable party: “Lord, is it tomorrow already?” kind of sums it up with uncertain, tumbling drums and a patchy touch’n’go guitar break, all hollow and slightly clammy, lending it an air of the not quite real.I had a few flashbacks for things from the ’80s that were resolutely lo-fi and home-made, and the madcap fizz of “Frizz”, with the exclaimed “Click, click here” fighting for space with a wig-out guitar solo which sounds like a riot in electrical form. The drummer has a bit of a workout on the cantering “A Little Bit Kinder” and the vocal refrain is a thing of loveliness. I mean, why shouldn’t we all be a little bit kinder?Listen to their message delivered artfully and succinctly with shooting-star guitar shimmer, like a bedsit Duane Eddy as the whole thing lollops along around a police siren rhythm that is another big game of chicken.
So far, so much righteous fun, but “Boy”, the final track, is where things really start to stretch with gentle bass strokes and a wistful vocal. The voice is full of character and is accompanied by scythes of guitar that slice through the backdrop. “Do you open your mouth when you cry?”, we are asked, and it seems like a poignant moment for the band to unleash a narrative runaway soundscape, as if they were scoring for an imaginary Sergio Leone film, one that involves lots of psychedelics and the scene is the Sussex Downs rather then Andalucía.This escaping narrative builds in intensity, particularly at the end as it achieves a crazy gallop and disappears into a cacophonous abyss. By then, the journey is over and I find myself thrilled that there are still people out there doing it totally themselves, immersed in such an idiosyncratic sound world. Go and buy it right now and help them to live the dream.
-Mr Olivetti-
