!!! - 'Take Ecstasy With Me' (Warp)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
So, their name can be any three repetitive sounds, can it? 'Chk Chk Chk', they offer us, rather boringly. Can we call them 'Smack! Smack! Smack!', or the sound of an airborne cat impacting with a barbed wire fence, so long as we accurately recreate the noise three consecutive times? Or name them 'Wet Wet Wet', maybe?
For my three repetitive sounds, I'm just going to put this double A side on thrice, and thereby make the greatest, most cumbersome band name ever. It's a pair of covers, a deliciously dreamy and drawn out take on The Magnetic Fields' 'Take Ecstasy With Me', all wah wah pedals, stings, irresistibly funky bass lines and wistful, tempting invites to take class A drugs backed with a streetwise, spacious and once again tremendously funky interpretation of Nate Dogg's 'Get Up'. The latter lasts nearly ten minutes when enjoyed in its unedited, glorious whole. For the primary three of 'em, it's a pretty faithful take, but then it races off in to a pummelling, erratically noisy world of hazy, intermittent bursts of sound and commands to 'shake it', all held together by a hypnotically persistent rhythm that hypnotises to a state where you can't predict it ever ending, and feel slightly at a loss for what to do when it finally does.
But far from being self-indulgent nonsense, the great thing about Wet Wet Wet, or however you want to pronounce !!!, is that they remain the best of fun with each and every beat. Not to mention that one sign of a truly clever band is just this - that they can spend this much time playing you other people's songs, and somehow still sound like nobody else you've ever heard.
Artists in this article: !!!
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