“Nice people don’t make good music” proclaims The Delta Frequency’s Myspace site, which may be a little on the sweeping side but the epithet certainly braces the listener for the onslaught that is their debut album. Certainly, the lyrical themes are not for the delicate: extreme, often sexualised, violence is embedded in the album. I find some parts of it hateful, but the themes that recur in the songs are part of modern life, anatomised pruriently in the newspapers and the rest of popular culture, and so we have to live with it.
Musically, the band approximates the electronica-influenced rock of Nine Inch Nails and shares Trent Reznor’s misanthropic view of humanity, expressed in song titles such as ‘The Monkey Dies Tonight, whose repulsive lyrics are summarised in the loathsome couplet: “ Put me in a room with a monkey and a typewriter/
I’ll teach him Shakespeare and then cave his face in”. Whether you continue listening or not depends on whether you think the band are hyperbolising, prophet-like, the cruelties and hypocrisies perpetrated in the name of human progress, or simply indulging in an orgy of viciousness for its own sake. I simply don’t know.
Some of the songs will be familiar to followers of the band: ‘Charge Me Up’ and ‘High Five’ come from an EP of early vintage, and haven’t changed much. ‘High Five’is an explicit, misogynistic account of a threesome, while ‘Charge Me Up’ seems to be a paean to sex toys. Musically, they are undeniably exciting, ‘High Five’ propelled by Alan Brown’s insistent, uncompromising drumming and ‘Charge Me Up’ lit up by a demon robot chanting obscenities through a vocoder over a disco-beat redolent of Franz Ferdinand when they were good.
Of the newer songs, ‘Abel’ is a standout, full of burning rock riffs and multi-voiced choruses. Phill Honey’s production, large-scale, uncluttered and confident is masterful. Matthew Garnham is a ‘get-the-job-done’ vocalist who doesn’t command attention like the similarly-timbred D. Gwalia from last month, but he’s solid here and throughout, apart from the intro to the laboured ‘Misanthrope’. The chorus and coda on this one feature Camille Baziadoly, lead singer on Honey’s other project ‘Dear City’, a band more to my taste than The Delta Frequency. I hope he can find time for both.
‘Eyes Wide’, another oldie, closes the record in some style. The use of a piano, along with the nods to David Bowie in the coda, serve to soften the mood a little, and bring the Delta Frequency as close as they come to pop, though the litany of offences angrily laid at the door of humanity continues unabated. So ends a record which is brilliantly performed, but sometimes overwrought and whose lyrics are occasionally repellent. One thing you can say about this band: they don’t do bland.