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| X Mist |
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| Plan B Magazine |
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“Improvised straight to hardrive” – then
adding only minimal overdubs, done. This is the DIY-logic of the Londoner
musicians collective Antifamily, which, after an EP release, now also
comes to us as an LP. The arty Antifamily, whose core consits of four
to five people, but who can number up to 15 on some projects, sees themselves
influenced by the early-seventies works of Brian Eno. For us tumbere Popconsumers
it sounds primarily like the artfully tattered, rhythm-emphasising postpunk
of the Slits and Raincoats, which surely is also due to the (constantly
switching, sung with English, French, Italian and German acent) female
vocals – or like the sawing and saxophon-screeching New Your No
Wave. All tracks are recorded out of the improvisation process, and people
are deliberately entrusted with instruments which they’ve never
held in their hands before – in line with the classic punk-selfimpowerment-gesture,
that connoisseurship had to be flushed down the toilet. This reminds,
amongst other things, of the position of the radical punk-collective Crass,
who were active in the 70s and 80s, in the same way the entire album seems
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TBA Review Translation:
“Though the band name speaks in principle against a associative closeness to communal existence and the one dimensional tea-felicity therein implied, one can neither deny a certain relationship to Amon Düül, nor to the nowadays obligatory flirt with the screechy NY-Noise-esthetics. With a debut album on the recommendable british label Difficult fun, the constantly growing band-collectiv from NY spreads itself like a cosmic patchwork in which everything noisy and strange may have its place. This does not seem surprising if one knows the process in which the 13 tracks were created. The tracks, so they say, were played on improvisational basis, only minimally re-worked afterwards and left pretty raw. But in the light of this they testify to a pretty high degree of song-structure and pop-appeal. The opening “law of the plainsmen” is reminiscent of the distracted goove of Malaria!, “work cheap” stuns with a primitive-meditative synth line and “j’advance” would have sounded similarly confused and rumbling had it been done by the Golden Palominos. With all those references from the past Antifamily manages nonetheless to create a sound-esthetic position to the now. If the dubby “nation of bastards’ points to the Slits, the querulous tape-echo-collage of the next track seems to already ring out from another star, who still remains to be discovered.”
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Terror Verlag Translation:
Who exactly is the star of this record?
Is it David Panos, “Difficult Fun” label boss and the man whose
elastic
tom-whirl lends an elastic backbone to the songs? Or even the record label
itself, which thanks to two formidably out of the line dancing [ yes, this
is the beauty of the german language – no idea how to translate it otherwise
] post punk and post rock compilations, accidental tape recordings,
calculated madness and Russian songs about watermelons as well as a few
unexhausted and unorthodox productions from the border territory between pop
and experiment- has totally unintentionally become the tip of the spear of
anything considered hip and cool? Perhaps.
But even more than all that does the pneumatic rubber-groove, which goes
right through all Antifamily songs, play a weighty part. No matter whether
one considers the disgruntled-squeaky digi-blues “Work Cheap” or
the
delicate-hypnotic piano trance of “The Shaft” or the laidback dub
structures
of the impertinently catchy “Nation of Bastards” – always
do they stimulate
body and mind simultaneously, seducing you to dance in spirit and in the
garage [geist und garage].
Beyond this one should on no account sell the meaning of the DIY mentality,
of the pure enjoying oneself and of the improvisation below its value: this
artists record, colourful and conceived in an eternal dissolution and
assembling-process, is clearly taking as it’s examples from the 70s and
early 80s, from bands like Joy Division (to whom a monument is set with the
darkly-stumbling-along Prima Luce) or from the songorientated Brian Eno
(the stoned dream bubble “Without Delay”), but it clearly speaks
its own
language.
This [language] contains a large electronic vocabulary, the twisted
sentence-webs of flower power, memorable slogans and above all much variety
– with the final, only just two-minute-long miniature it even includes
an
ambient run-out groove. But all this is only by-work which pales behind the
singers here involved. The way Melanie Gilligan snakes herself sharp-tongued
and seductively mono-tonal through the futuristic manifesto “I of the
Law”,
Agnese Trocci and Rachel Baker chant their paroles bored and shaky and
always just past the tune and l the irresistibly Juliette Savin lolls
herself in the dirty caves of the mowtown-fantasy “J’ Advance”,
[this way]
is simply brutally beguiling and on top of it unique.
And then there is Asja auf Capri frontwoman Anja Kirschner, whom one knows
already from the previous “Difficult Fun” releases, thanks to her
varyingly
pressurefull-dominant and ingratiatingly-relaxed delivery.
It is therefore difficult to take a definitive position in the question of
the decisive element, but it if has to be the following should be held fast
to: the true star of “Antifamily” is this record itself, it’s
unforced way,
its mix of quasi-commerciality and quarellsomeness and its catchy
spontaneity. Even if one can still find joy as well in other things: This
doesn’t happen every day.
