Bloody people. Way too many on the planet and never enough where gigs are involved. James James‘s debut show may not be in the same expectation bracket as, say, Public Image Ltd but the first fruits of Simon and Rich’s post-King Alexander project light my candle at least, and work well amongst the junk and open spaces of the Buffalo Bar. Spacious guitar and rock duo = inevitable comparisons to No Age I guess but James James are much more drawn out than that, building up slowly from the looped, thrumming sampler, adding scratches of guitar and drums that threaten rather than pound. It’s oddly meditative stuff, injected with periods of nicely gauche rocking when Rich swaps to guitar, leading to a brilliantly strung out final song that bolts rising guitar clang to repetitive drum bashing like some lo-fi, primitive Trans Am. Excellent stuff.
A lot of bands are described as playing as if they’re on fire; Munch Munch play like light is shooting from and through them, like sunbeams and Christmas decorations blinking on and off forever. They may look like five students with mild troubles dressing themselves but Munch Munch’s tartrazine pop prog is totally great – experimental without being up its own bum, fun while carrying a hefty weight of dancable substance. Lack of electric guitar (a bass player holds things down) gives the massed keyboard and glockenspiel ripples space to shine, slithering over double drumming heavy on cymbals and ricocheting snare. Everything meets in the air like a glitter gun. It makes a warped kind of sense that the first track on MM’s quickly-bought-after-the-gig debut album sounds like the ‘Pure Imagination’ song from Willy Wonka: this is music as seen through Quality Street wrappers, green sock-wearing nerd pop refracted through a load of dusty prisms. If you want to see paradise… well, you generally won’t find it in Buffalo, but you can sometimes catch it flying past.
