A large percentage of the population have recently had the good fortune to be diagnosed with bipolar personality disorders, which allows them to behave like complete assholes for a certain period of the day while enjoying immunity from a well-deserved punch in the snout, all courtesy of our restless medical men, who in the absence of exciting new illnesses, like to invent new ones to keep themselves in work. Musically, Space Heroes of the People seem to suffer under this illness, producing brilliant, tense electronica one minute, and mediocre doodles the next. This demo is about half and half.
On the downside, the uninspired ‘Piano Loops’ is a mark in the debit column. Beginning with a cheapo Casio nursery school piano figure, the track builds reluctantly with the addition of poorly-recorded double-bass (a fifteen-year-old cat trying to sing Leonard Cohen was one of my colleagues’ OTT verdict) and poorly-played drums plus a couple of OK synth lines, but the paucity of the initial material limits what can be done to boost the track, adding up to a total dud.
Far, far better is the sprightly ‘Tesco Disco’ which is the sort of track to get the often-excitable Nightshift talking about ‘potentially the best band in Oxford’. The initial gambit is a long-forgotten TV-game bleep which is rather hypnotic in its own right, later becoming underscored with Grandaddy-like drumming and a simple Depeche-Mode synth line. True the later additions of guitar and double-bass are very low-fi but the track has a rocking grooviness which evades criticism.
Mendelssohn once said of the Hallelujah Chorus that if his faith ever weakened that chorus would be enough to restore it. The appearance in any form of the religious maniac Richard Dawkins has the same effect on me, on the grounds that if one has to choose between the intolerance of Dawkins on the one hand and that of ayatollahs such as the late Jerry Falwell on the other, then the cynical Pascal’s Wager kicks in i.e. the possibility of being condemned to share an eternal cell with the neo-Darwinian high priest is too appalling to be borne. One step up from this is the Space Heroes’ ‘Def Con One’ which gives the rationalist pub-bore free reign, (sample lyric: “all men of reason must now say ‘enough is enough…’”). Dawkins’ spiel rather crowds the stage, making the track unlistenable, which is a shame as the grinding Doors-influenced accompaniment (there is even a Hammond organ whirring away in there somewhere) is powerful and impressive.
The best is kept to last with the unashamedly hedonistic ‘Groovy Dancer’. Oddly for such a futuristic band, the tune is noticeably blues-like in structure: it’s just that instead of harps and guitars we have drum pads and old-school analogue synths. The great strengths of the track are its drama and urgency- it’s the sort of song PhD chemists put on the stereo at 7.30p.m. to get them through to close of play at 22.00. Fabulously good.