Glam anthems and hardcore rants. The whir of techno and the crunch of britpop. Emo-boy crying and scary stalker screeds. The Cooper Temple Clause are a wily bunch, that's for sure.
Their debut album, See This Through and Leave, seems at first listen to be a mish mash of all that's wrong with guitar rock: Unoriginal genre-splicing. Maudlin songwriting. Uninspired lyrics. Annoying sibling-band guitars. A contrived and utterly overdone ragamuffin slack-boy image. It's the stuff vengeful rock critics are seething with. At first it gives you pause. Why would anyone want to make this album? well, the damn album gets in your head. It works its way in there like a rare South American parasite worming through your brain.
And the only way to get it out -- naturally, in this case -- is to play the album until you're sick of it.
Here they come, the young men with the unwieldy name and topiary haircuts, waving the flag for revitalised UK guitar rock 2002. They have last year's most idiosyncratic Top 40 hit, 'Kill All Music' under their second-hand belts, and a (deserved) reputation for bone-rattlingly bonkers live performances. Still, they're an unlikely bunch. Cooper Temple Clause don't so much kill music as deconstruct and reanimate it like deranged Dr. Frankentein's stitching together limbs from every conceivable genre onto a twitching post-rock torso.
As a result, their debut album 'See This Through...' is a defiant, often thrilling, monstrosity.
There are so many ideas crammed into this record that within the first three minutes you'll be asking if it's the same band, much less the same song, you're listening to. CTC ricochet around like rocks in a tumble dryer, and although it1s difficult to find anything to cling to, their schizoid fusion of influences is impressive and their energy is relentless. The click and thud of techno coexists with propulsive Primals rock'n'roll in 'Prazer
Attack', 'Who Needs Enemies?' is like an uglier Oasis covering Portishead, and 'Did You Miss Me?' start sweet and spangly before ballooning into a sinister, bloated stalker-anthem. Throughout, there are shades of everyone from Floyd to The Pixies, Spiritualized to Supergrass, Cheap Trick to Zeppelin. The only consistent elements are a prodigious, agitated wall of sound and Ben Gautrey's raw-throated vocals.
It takes guts to be unfashionable, and CTC are patently unaffected by the zeitgeist - wearing their patchouli proudly in an arena full of Calvin Klein. They simply do what they do, and we can take it or leave it.
There's no obsequious genuflection to the current vogue for trad-retro revivalism. Some songs trail on for eight minutes plus, and there's no discernible tune on the whole album. The only contemporary band CTC are comparable to, possibly, is Muse, as both embrace ludicrous excess with shameless enthusiasm. And neither, apparently, are afraid of looking ridiculous. While a band that manages to reference both Ogden Nash and the Moody Blues can't be all bad, chances are they're not all good either.
CTC do have weaknesses, and being unfocused is certainly one of them. It's also strange that for all its emotional-sounding contortions, this records still feels so hollow. 'See This Through...' is more for the head than the heart (though exactly whose head is hard to say). The only thing heartening is that such a complex and unconventional sound can be making populist impact - not only puncturing the charts, but landing CTC with a video spot virtually every five minutes on MTV2 for 'Been Training Dogs'. Their appeal may be difficult to define, but they've definitely got it
Did You Miss Me?
Film Maker
Panzer Attack
Who Needs Enemies?
Amber
Digital Observation
Let's Kill Music
555-4823
Been Training Dogs
The Lake
Murder Song
