Review: Alpha Male Tea Party - Droids (Superstar Destroyer Records)

With a name like Alpha Male Tea Party, you tend to assume a bit of madness in the music they make. Oh boy, do they like madness. Coming right out of the gate tweaking and thrashing like a wild bull, Droids is a bombastic mass of frantic riffs, blasting bass and stuttering drums. Sounding like At The Drive-In during a sugar rush, AMTP’s songs all hold a sense of delirious joy in the chaos being created. With song names like ‘You Eat Houmous; Of Course You Listen To Genesis’ it’s pretty hard to not smile when you can hear how much fun the band is having.

Droids is an attempt by the band to put to music their frustrations with the drudgery of monotonous offices, faceless corporations and the 9 to 5. Yet when you have songs titled as 'I Haven't Had A Lunch Break Since Windows Vista Came Out', you get the sense that maybe they aren’t trying to send much of a message. Instead, using that pent-up energy to smash some guitars and let loose.

Droids is an album of joyful noise, yet when it decides to slow the pace, the outcome is breathtaking. ‘Your Happiness Was Stored On A Hard Drive And Is Now Corrupt’ transforms from a slow building ballad into an immense wall of shimmering noise and gives the album a new spur of life. The jerky math-rock riffs are enjoyable, but it’s the combination of this chaos with those moments of sheer bliss that bring depth and richness to the mix. Underneath all the explosive noise there’s a method in the madness, a beauty just waiting to be unearthed.

Words: Alex Adams

Review: Mathew Gray – The Crocodile EP

I approached Mathew Gray and The Awful Truth's EP, The Crocodile, with a little caution; more than a little in fact. For some reason, I was fearful of sub-Syd Barrett whimsy. Maybe it was the title and the cover image and I am clearly as shallow as a puddle because, it turns out, I was miles and several genres wide of the mark.

The title tune is our entry into Mr Gray's world. It is dense with wordplay, poetry and imagery, deeply serious in subject, and light, skippy and joyous in performance. He wraps a deep sense of our place in the world as puny humans and our tiny part in the history of the earth, in something we would dearly wish very cool teachers to play to our children at school. The next song, ‘Took Away Tomorrow’ aches to its bones with emotion and is sung with a rare blend of sadness and detachment, with faint echoes of the criminally underrated Ed Harcourt. I especially love ‘Someone To Blame’, a cool dissection of the motivators of extremism with a percussion part so perfectly placed it made me grin like I was having my feet gently ticked.



In fact, all the playing here is from the very top drawer: all the musicians knowing when to hold back and when to politely run riot. The EP closes with ‘The Soldier’, its first person narrative occasionally dipping into the well worn war's a bad thing, who exactly are we fighting for? point, but driven forward by genuinely wonderful instrumental work pulled in from the worlds of classical and folk. The Crocodile by Mathew Gray and The Awful Truth is altogether rather ace.

Words: John Wigley.