Test-Icicles - 'For Screening Purposes Only' (Domino)
3/5
By: Matt Tomiak
It's a long shot, certainly, but perhaps, in generations to come, 2005 will be known as some sort of year zero. A musical watershed, in which the outdated concepts of melody, structure and lyrical coherence ceased to contain any degree of relevance.
East London's Test Icicles would like to think so. Whether anyone else does is open to question. They are hindered by a moniker that seems to follow Principal Skinner from 'The Simpsons' justification in branding Homer's barbershop quartet 'The B-Sharps' - 'what we need is a name that's witty at first, but that seems less funny each time you hear it!'.
Big on strange noises, short on tunes, 'For Screening Purposes' is a squarkingly atonal, collision of Bloc Party and Sonic Youth stumbling over At The Drive-In. At their most accessible ('Circle, Square, Triangle'), they sound like Kele Okereke drunkenly attempting karaoke versions of Le Tigre. At the less user-friendly end of the spectrum - see 'Catch It!' - they might most charitably be described as 'challenging'. That is, if 'challenging' applies to the sound of System Of A Down attempting to play Muse's 'Absolution' LP with an enhanced death metal 'twist' after undergoing a particularly heavy session of 'Clockwork Orange'-style, mind-bending psychotherapy. Yep... *challenging.*
So are Test Icicles fearless Captain Beefheart-style pioneers, valiantly disassembling musical barriers on behalf of an oblivious, complacent public? Or witless practitioners of hopelessly indulgent dross: the aural equivalent of that exhibit in the Tate Modern that so excites the art school crowd but to the 'untrained' eye merely looks like a great big pile of empty cardboard boxes? There'll be no shortage of differences of opinion on this one.
Artists in this article: Test-Icicles
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