- Every band has influences, some are just more obscure than others; Empat Lima I’m looking at you. The Melbourne trio have a DIY post-punk sound that you can trace back to the all-over-the-place, but life-affirmingly warm and tuneful stylings of The Raincoats. Another big chunk of what they do comes from South East Asia’s fascination with ‘60’s girl groups, so a bit like that nostalgic garage pop that made Cambodian Space Project a lot of fun, a few years back. However, in the three years since their last EP, Satu BOOM! they’ve been furiously saving up songs for a debut full-length and reckon there’s just a whole bunch of weird and wonderful genres being whisked around in there. I hope I’m up to the task of nutting it all out.
There are some twists and turns that are hard to miss, like the slow and psychedelic saunter of Passage To The Golden Sky, which sounds a bit like the Gamelan backing Tom Waits used on a lot of his later material. That’s on the side, on the other you get medicated Beach Boys’ sounding baa-baa-baaas and the two sandwich the trippily, mystically oriental song filling in between. If Golden Sky has an antithesis on the album it’s the fierce outlier that is Fire Dragon, which paces and snaps and snarls before a chorus of molten punk screaming belches forth.
Actually, both songs are surprisingly sedate in their pacing, but much of the rest of the record really bounces along. No wave funk isn’t much of a stretch for Empat Lima and listening to a cut like Bowie On The Beach you’ll hear the bass-driven rhythm section powering along like Liquid Liquid as Steph Brett does her best, wispy Deborah Harry impersonation, high up in the stratosphere. Elsewhere, like on the haunted house fun of Mooncake the band really turn up the pop sweetness and, if it were a little less arty, it’d basically be The B52’s.
Wispy, spooky, ghostly, these are actually some of the most lasting impressions that I come away with from Cling Clang Clutter. For all the funk and the punk, there’s a breezy, other-worldly quality that kicks in right from the sighing, moaning opening of the album’s first number Gazelle. For me, it’s the record’s most enduring stylistic motif. Cling, Clang, Clutter might be named for the cavalcade of odd percussive noises within and -at its most over-the-top- like the euphorically silly children’s song plus of Canteloupe, with extra added cowbell accompanying chants of “jump, jump Mr. Rope, your head’ll pop like a canteloupe!” that’s very much in evidence. More often, however, the thumping recedes into the background and you’ll get, instead, something like the nostalgic romance and phantom pop that is Kosta, quietly pining for the crushes of yesterday, delivering glorious lines like “Kosta-a-a, was the one who made me think that kissing could be fun.”
Cling Clang Clutter really is a record that has a lot of quite unusual things going on in its strange playground. Poppy, punk, funky, DIY, arty and ethereal, it’s complex and its influences aren’t obvious, so it takes quite a bit of listening to get into the swing of things. There are times it may just sound like the weird collection of angular thumps and bangs it self-deprecatingly takes for its title. Underneath the clutter however, lurking in that complexity, there’s something supernaturally swift and sweet, plundering the forgotten music of yesterday and bringing back rewards from the beyond.
- Chris Cobcroft.