Termites - 'Set Yourself On Fire' (Headwrecker)
3/5
By: Thomas Hannan
Occasionally, bands can appear bored with their own songs. It needn't be to their detriment, nor lead to their sound being as uninteresting as they seem to find it. If you're as fidgety and restless as the Termites, it's a natural consequence of making music so frantic that you just can't wait to bash out the next bit.
Seeing as long attention-spans don't seem to be something the band collectively possesses, it isn't entirely necessary for the listener to own one either. What is advisable is an open mind, a tolerance of things happening or not longer happening without there being any viable justification to be found for it either way. If it's some frenetic distortion masking mangled reggae you want, it's there in the title-track, but not for long - it's ushered elsewhere by an out of the blue mental riff sopping in reverb, blurring in to 'Wrong', the kind of thing The Libertines might write if they played at three times the speed, enjoyed screwy rhythms and, y'know, still spoke to each other.
And what's going on with 'Amusement (Lorry Crash)'? Anyone's guess. Beginning as a softly played organ ballad, there's then an edgy sea shanty one minute and a section of uneasy quietness the next before a full on noisy rock outro ends things without anyone being any the wiser as to what just happened. Condensing an album's worth of peculiar ideas in to three tracks might not make for easy or particularly tuneful listening, but it's undeniably a curious one. Songs made by nutters, for nutters. We hope you're very happy together.
Artists in this article: Termites
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