The Beautiful New Born Children – 'Hey People!' (Domino)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
The name's more loved up than a hippy on the third day of an open air festival, but the music has a heart that's pure punk rock and this record is the sound of its irregular beat. The Beautiful New Born Children are chaos theory explored through guitars, a car crash in a record store. You've done burps that have lasted longer than most of these songs, and have sounded surprisingly like quite a few of them too. Stupid music, but crazy fun.
The madness starts as it means to go on, with the Nirvana mocking joviality of 'Do the Do' possessing the kind of wild abandon you'd feel if someone left you alone in a sweet shop as a kid. There's a real wide eyed and childish quality to it and everything that follows on this most frantic of debuts, but even though they sound incredibly immature and probably look like swear words, something about their bratty nature remains quite endearing even where it should be infuriating.
Maybe it's because this feels like a release. They are all actually parents - or so it's claimed - one of them to a beautiful new born child. It feels like time off. What indeed would it be like to have this lot as your olds? You can imagine there would be a great record collection to pilfer. The Stooges. The Fall. Pavement. They'd just be useless at helping with the geometry homework. After all, they can barely concentrate on one of their own songs for very long. The whole ramshackle affair, in nine songs, lasts little longer than the amount of time it would take to read aloud the album's lyric sheet.
To be precise, its duration is an epic twenty-three minutes, and seven of them are donated to one song. It's exhilarating, but repetitive as hell. And that would become maddening if it wasn't for the band knowing precisely when it is that enough is enough, and bashing out the same tune for longer than about a minute and a half actually isn't necessary. It's not actually until the fifth track ('Left, Right, Forward') that anything resembling a tune appears and even then, you wonder if it is in fact an instance of song writing or whether merely that after four tracks of the stuff you're finally latching on to the spirit of things. It's like the Ramones, but tinnier, and if anything it might even be more punk. You could at least sing along to the Ramones, after all. Lord knows what this lot are yelping.
Picking out individual tracks for praise or damnation is pointless as they all sound much of a muchness, but monotonous and cyclic though everything might be it's all so concise and condensed that there simply isn't time to get bored of anything. What's great about it is how they've absolutely hit the nail on the head with the recording to the point where you wonder if it even sounds quite this good live, where it should probably thrive.
Without a serious bone in their body, The Beautiful New Born Children have themselves birthed something so unpretentious, scruffy and adorable that it should find its way in to many hearts even if you probably in all honesty won't feel much of a desire to play it particularly often. You'll just be super-happy that you own this when that itch for brief, violent excitement starts to set in. There might not have been an actual note played or sung the whole time. They might have just spat out the whole thing. Who. Cares. Nothing could blow out the cobwebs quite so convincingly or gleefully as this.
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