Squid - Bright Green Field

 

It's a good job I'm finding so much music I really love this year. Otherwise I'd be being spectacularly irritated at the kind of bands who are being hailed as little less than the complete zeitgeist by pretty much all and sundry around me. This new Post Punk thing. You know, the one where any chancers with some Fall, Gang of Four, Pop Group, Captain Beefheart or Can records can spew out haphazard, jerky rhythms and seemingly endless, ranted dirges and call them art.

Here come Squid with their debut Bright Green Field, the latest, and probably worst example yet of this unprepossessing fad. There have been plenty of similar cases thus far this year. Black Country, New Road at the start of the year, Dry Cleaning a few weeks back. Apparently there's a new Black Midi record coming up the pike. Can't wait. No actually I can. I've had enough. So much of this stuff is the Emperor's New Clothes and more people should be saying so.

I listened through to Bright Green Field just now. Better to do your research I thought, rather than just launching out about it without sampling the product. It brought me very little joy. There were occasional passages when I thought 'OK, this is passable', but they were frankly few and far between and the band made sure they soon spoiled any momentary listening pleasure I was experiencing. This is one of the worst albums I've heard for a long time. Yet it's already being hailed as something of a classic in some quarters. So what am I missing?

The records these albums are grounded in, Dragnet, Entertainment, Doc at the Radar Station and Ege Bamyasi are furious, abrasive statements of sound and ideas. They're restless, ever shifting masses and they still sound great. I'm sorry but I really can't see many people listening to Dry Cleaning and Squid  forty years down the line from now. They're actually rather conservative to my ears, their noise annoys, as does their portentousness and vanity. The angrier the singer from Squid got and the sound behind became him became more cacaphonous and avant, the closer I came to nodding off. I'm sorry I've heard this done many times before. And so much better.

There are those that are taking similar influences and making something genuinely fresh and exciting from them. I'd point to Protomartyr, Fontaines D.C., Total Control and Goat Girl in this respect. But so much of this is walking on the spot. It villifies the mundane while being mundane itself. Shame. I liked some of Squid's early releases. They seemed to have some potential. They've gone nowhere close to beginning to fulfil it here. Frankly, they depressed me rather. I won't be coming back here.