Funk music! Yeah! Rock music! Yeah! Put them together and what have you got? Heaps of indulgent shite for the most part. Pretty much any fusion style is going to be less than the sum of its parts (ska-punk – there’s another prime culprit) but few genres rub each other the wrong way as badly as funk and rock, even if The Red Hot Chili Peppers did have their moments. Sadly the Chili Peppers, like Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon, managed to inspire huge swathes of imitators who managed to completely miss the point. Which, somewhat untidily, brings us to Abingdon’s Montana Gold, a name that in itself sounds like a cheap brand of coffee trying too hard to sound exotic.
Montana Gold are five sixteen year-olds from Abingdon who play funk-rock. Given their tender ages, the temptation is to patronise them and go easy. But what the hell: spare the rod and spoil the child and all that. It’s difficult to unearth a redeeming feature hidden within these two tracks, although the singer’s name, Jimmy Van Hear is mildly amusing; it sounds like something his mum might shout up the stairs to him when the rest of the band arrive to take him to rehearsal.
The whole thing is so anonymous, so generic it feels more like the sort of copyright-free library music that only ever got used in low-budget German porn films in the darkest recesses of the 1970s. ‘Dear Lady’ at least doesn’t mess about with foreplay – it’s straight in there with the widdly guitar solo, the rhythm guitar backing it up with that clichéd chopped-out funk sound. Thankfully Herr Van Hear is on hand to iron out any semblance of personality that might accidentally ooze out of the music’s clogged pores, his voice a flat-lining howl that’s not so much pedestrian as stuck in the queue for a bus that never comes. I’m not sure if it’s fair to blame Jamiroquai for all this but fuck it, let’s blame Jamiroquai for everything anyway.
‘Checkered Hunt’ – which looks like it ought to sound rude if you say it too quickly but sadly doesn’t – seems ready to ditch even that modicum of funkiness which ‘Dear Lady’ possessed, leaving it hopelessly exposed as rock work-out, and ends up sounding like something that might have leaked out of Reef’s backside sometime back when Montana Gold were surely too young to have been exposed to such musical atrocities. Then again, Reef were among that elite strike-force of bands lumped together under the banner Dad-rock back in the 90s, so maybe we could blame their fathers for all this.
No, sod it, let’s blame Jamiroquai again.
Montana Gold on MySpace, and on SoundCloud