The electronic side project is becoming as much of a rock cliché as the garish wedding, the spell in rehab and the ill-advised clothing range, but there is some good material being made by rockers who find a freedom in front of the PC that they don’t get in the rehearsal studio. After five minutes of racking our brains to identify the vocalist on this EP, Google told us it was Gus Rogers from Dial F For Frankenstein and Kill Murray, and, along with George Hopcroft, he has created an interesting adjunct to the speed-indie intensity of those bands. Unpunished Monsters’ sound springs from the ersatz sleaze of Prince-influenced club music from the last gasps of the 1980s, adding some drunken dizziness, and it’s utterly beguiling, at least when it doesn’t get overly wry.
‘Palace Guards’ is a wonderful opener, ladling a robo-lothario vocal onto a tweaked Frankie Knuckles keyboard part until the whole gloriously fake cocktail has the rubbery whiff of post-human lovin’ best exhibited by Jamie Principle’s ‘Baby Wants To Ride’. There’s more android soul in the EP’s high point, ‘Moon Dance’, where a seditiously sexy croon rides a woozy, swingbeat rhythm, something like a new-wave Jamie Lidell. Some Plone-like metallophone parts tumble in the background, underpinning a tale a tale of teenage boredom that may have come from a Dead Jerichos song:
“We go down to the playground for somewhere to drink / And I will fight you like a caveman, too wired to think”
It’s a fascinatingly immersive little song, imbued with the cheap tedium of a youth spent in the suburbs, and balances the more dance oriented tracks on the record, such as ‘Day Dreamer’, which sounds like a euphoric remix of some minor alternative hit, and could comfortably sit in many a contemporary DJ set.
The record isn’t all perfect. ‘Negative Capability’ starts well as a post-Numan thump, but doesn’t have enough going on to fill three minutes (plus the link to Keats is unfathomable), whereas ‘Neon Lung’ is too arch, a winking “The 80s are so, like, old” concoction of electro-funk keys, trashy guitar and treated vocals slapped between a tired vocal sample and some arbitrary drum’n’bass. No sleep till Shoreditch. But these lowpoints are heavily outweighed by the brash tartiness of Unpunished Monsters’ best music, like a sonic version of heavily daubed mascara. We hope this collaboration isn’t a one-off, and we won’t be surprised to find that ‘Moon Dance’ ends up one of our favourite Oxford tunes of 2012. Download for free, and start mixing the pina coladas with ketamine today!
Download the EP for free from the Unpunished Monsters website. Here’s a moody film that Unpunished Monsters put together to promote the EP: