POLIO - The Krill Is Dry - EP Review

If you know anything about Polio, you'll know that they don't abide by the status quo in any respect. Infact I'd hedge my bets that they aren't particularly fond of the band, Status Quo - that's how un-status quo they are.

 You might therefore consider Polio as a punk band, which would entail that the band are anti-establishment and reject mainstream tendencies. This is a half-truth. Yes they think everything is bollocks, but the manner in which they do it isn't what I'd deem as punk - it's cleverer than that, infact many / most of their songs consist of very pop and mainstream influences.  For instance, their previous debut EP,  entitled Pig Heart Boy is named after a wanky late 90's BBC television series in which a boy is given a heart transplant to save his life, it worked!...but wait for it, here's the twist, his heart was swapped with a pig's heart!

More ironic citations of popular yet somehow obscure themes are evident throughout their musical oeuvre, starting with the bands very name - Polio ; Thom, Carl and Carlos' previous musical endeavor was a band called 'Fresh Legs'....now compare this with 'Polio', a disease which can severely wither the legs, and you can already understand what direction the band is moving before they've even picked up an instrument. Other obscure pop culture references include mentions of Master Chef and Wes Anderson in their song lyrics as well as track names from their EP's, such as:Razumikhin,  Oliver Cromwell, and Lava.

 With a certain amount of pastiche and irony, Polio's music does what punk music does without being so fucking obvious, and with a few more ideas up their crumb encrusted sleeves. They 'celebrate' pop culture with screams, heavy riffs, sporadic drumming patterns and bizarre breakdowns, all of which create a surreal listening experience - like listening to a gang of clowns make a child laugh and then proceed to throttle the child for laughing.  Unfortunately that listening experience doesn't have a genre, so the most consistent allocation of genre for Polio would probably be 'Mathcore' - although it still makes me feel uneasy to classify them as such. 

Polios latest offering, The Krill Is Dry, is a no holds barred 6 track EP that will leave you rubbing your nipples in delight (or alternatively, shielding your arse in disgust). 

 It opens with an intro track which i always think is a good start because it means that the band actually care about the listening experience of the EP and don't just want to create klub bangerz. 

After setting a foreboding tension with their purely instrumental intro, we are then met with a host of klub bangerz. 

In track 2,  Skooma, the listener is straight away metaphorically punched in the sternum by strong throaty vocals, heavy drumming and thrashy guitar and flows in and out of heavy break downs that culminate in another punch in the sternum to round the track off. This track let's you know that Polio are heavier and more twisted than ever.

The third track, They Came Bounding Over, once again punches the aforementioned sternum and leads to a fantastic middle section (reminiscent of Test Icicles but not as queer), that hardcore lovers could definitely two-step to (but they won't because they are too busy straightening their hair). The track then falls into a dichotomy of weird guitar back and forths and intricate drumming until the track seeps out into a slow and heavy chorus of "HOLD HER DOWN".

Track 4 is called Women that Explode, this song, like many of Polio's songs has swearing in it.


Track 5 - Lava, is named after a crap late night music channel on Sky (channel 378).  However tongue and cheek the song may be, a late verse about the fable of Icarus spat out by Thom genuinely exudes a butt-load of pathos and his muffled screams of "ICARUS" chill to the bone. 

The sixth and final track of the EP is entitled Low Self Esteem Week and begins with a purposefully tinny solo drum intro, met with Polio's self confessional, funny and sarcastic lyrics, and the recurring gang vocals that have been put to good use throughout the EP.   The track ends with a two minute instrumental decline which acts as the EP's outro, and just like the intro, it ends with a curious a sense of foreboding, which will leave you feeling paranoid and insecure, like a 13 year old girl that has just had her first period whilst listening to Nirvana.

you can buy the EP here it's fucking great! 

We have now truly entered the digital age.

We are shifting so far into a digitally orientated world that I'm pretty sure my cock and balls have turned into 0's and 1's.  There is no greater sign of the times than BBC's recent termination of the long running clunky, Lego inspired information service known as Ceefax.  The service began in 1974 as a popular anytime information service and eventually became obsolete and ended up only being used by dithering old people who smell like rust and people who accidentally lent on their TV controller.  My personal experience of Ceefax were of it's overnight broadcasts complete with terrible porn-jazz music.  I would get up really early as a kid and just watch Ceefax and graze on cereal, waiting for heavily stereotype driven cartoon Hammerman to air, starring an animated MC Hammer and his magic talking shoes that would turn him into the superhero "Hammerman" when he wore them. Or  alternatively on another channel, I could watch a blue hedgehog that was really fast and enjoyed chilli dogs ... but that one was just fucking stupid and unrealistic.

I feel a little bit sad that Ceefax has gone, but i can't really justify why it should survive. Ceefax had been a dormant gene in the genetic make up of what we now call the Digital Age. A throwback from a previous generation that no longer has a use in its new modern environment of high speed internet connections, smart phones and Shake-Away milkshakes.

This screen shot illiterates how boring this man called John is.

I reported the comment on grounds that he sounds really boring and if you look you'll see he's inciting boringness among at least 28 other people.

Here's some Ceefax "Chillin' Out" music incase you had forgotten its genius.

Of more importance than my last post, here's what my cat typed whilst walking on the keyboard:

Im pretty sure my cat wasn't looking for H&M Jimmy choo. Just a reminder that for all google's knowledge and prowess, it doesn't know if i'm a human or a cat, which it makes it stupid. I am an Iams cat! LOL, GUFFAW!

Lactose Intolerance

My blogging service provider, Eblogger, gives me analytics such as how many people view my blog.  The number doesn't shift much, it's mainly you occasionally looking at it every so often in a blue moon on a gap year whilst sewing wings on little oinklets whilst reciting the 37 proverbs of Wengal McSummary.  The idea behind these blogs have been to create something completely of its own ilk. I want it to be that little bit of oregano floating in your otherwise tomatoey tasting italian dish which you learned from Jamie Oliver, but with swearing in it. The oregano is swear words. Arse piss.

 Sainsburys are mates with Jamie Oliver.  D'ya reckon he gives a shit about healthy food or just about having Jamie endorsed chain restaurants? I wonder if those restaurants use Sainsbury food coz Jamie likes Sainsbury's loads, or whether he doesn't care or know what goes in the food at all. Does he care about school dinners, or is he once again the face or the ambassador for another annoying campaign? Having been served food during the Jamie Oliver spear-headed school food initiatives, let me tell you it was fucking dire!    As a genuine school goer whose one solace in an entire day of Victorian style school teaching was lunch time, to have something with sugar or calories taken from you and instead replaced by expensive cardboard tasting items, was depressing.  This campaign was, (in corresponding terms of schoolboy propensity's),  what Maggie Thatcher was to the Mining Industries. It felt shit. We knew the government didn't want us to eat Turkey Twizzlers, but that made this novelty meat all the more alluring, and made the government seem like dicks. If the government wanted future votes, all Tony Blair had to do was feed us a shit load of mechanically removed meats or sprinkled doughnuts and we would be feverishly voting for Labour and licking its would be sticky iced bun fingers. Instead David Cameron is lapping up all the milk which should be packaged in cartons and drunk by school kids. The conservative party won't serve kids milk because Maggie took the milk away in the first place, and the liberals will only suck the teet of the conservatives to get their milk coz they like the taste.

And apparently the dairy producers are losing money because supermarkets aren't paying them enough per pint... how long until milk is imported to the UK from foreign lands? I think i'm a bit lactose intolerant so i say fuck to all of it, im sick of weening from teets, im going to drink water coz its neutral. I might buy a bottle of water for whatever ridiculous price they now cost just so the bottle ruins the earths atmosphere and kills hummingbirds and bottle nose dolphins and eventually eradicates the human race... that way i wouldn't have problems drinking milk and being school tardy.

fuck off

TV

The general consensus has always been that television is a form of escapism.  It exists (as far as the consumer is concerned) to entertain and inform, and distract you from shit things.  Like money troubles.  The trouble with TV however, is money.  Fair enough TV wouldn't exist without the stuff, but if you ever have the inconvenience of watching daytime TV then money is the both the subject and plot for the majority of TV programs. This isn't escapism, this is hyper-reality. I'm not sure where part one of Bargain Hunt ends and my Tesco shop begins. I've started taking a six pack of walkers cheese and onion crisps to auction houses in the hope of a small profit.

Homes Under The Hammer, Put Your Money where Your Mouth Is, Flog-it. All things that speculate how much something is worth with the intention to sell and make a profit.  It's basically a very small scale model of how global financial market works and judging by how fucked up that is, it's not really a format i want to passively watch as narrative. Or maybe i do? Maybe investors in global markets do? Maybe they watch Flog-It and gamble our money on the basis of whether a 1930's brass shoe-horn reaches its estimate of £12-£15 or pull shares out of China's Steel industry on the strength of a 1979 Beano annual selling for more than expected?

As if the programs aren't enough bollocks about money, every 7 or 8 minutes I am met with a holocaust of adverts that keep asking me if i have been miss-sold PPI, or if I've had an injury in the workplace, and if so i could be entitled to $5695 or possibly even more if i fell off a ladder and/or have a crap fringe.  Or how about adverts that think i'm old and want to give me a Free Parker Pen if i give them loads of money.  Or the adverts that think i'm a cunt and would consider a £1000 loan with  1749% APR.

Game-shows have given up on any sort of imagination. Whether its completely guessing which boxes have more money in them than others in the case of 'Deal or No Deal', or simply not bothering to hide the fact that the game-show is crap by titling it  'Pointless'.   You can only ever win money on game-shows now.  I remember games such as Catch-Phrase where you could win a trip to the Bahamas for two, or an exotic cruise to any number of idyllic and seemingly utopian destinations. The little exerts of what these places looked like and what you could do and eat and smell seemed so appealing.  Nowadays it seems like prizes have been replaced by cash and the game show presenter occasionally asking the contestants what they would spend the money on if they won.

"So Pam from East Croyden, what would you spend the money on if you won?"

"Dust.... and maybe some drugs so that the dust is more interesting. Yeh, that usually does the trick."

Why are we making photographs nostalgic before they have even had the time to become nostalgic?

Instagram and other similar applications are getting on my tits a bit now. A photograph by its very nature is something of the past. As soon as the photograph is taken it is a history, so what i don't understand is why so many people will add filters to photographs in an attempt to make them look like something from yester-year. The photograph will one day be nostalgic, give it time. The instagram filters are a way of trying to add a sense of spontaneity and element of chance to a photograph, much like 'hipsters' using shit lomo cameras to get 'cool' colours and fringing and terrible resolution. (It annoys me how that for the same money people pay for all this lomography stuff, people could be taking beautiful photographs with vintage film cameras with sharp optics and heavy duty build quality...but oh well.) Instagram basically imitates the characteristics of film. By adding a filter after taking the photograph to make it look like it was shot on film, therefore removing any spontaneity and chance factor involved - and even then, the filters are based on rigid mathematical code in software, not the true chaos of chemical reactions based on light and temperature that creates chance elements in film. To me the instagram photograph is generally typified by a photograph of a drink which is an appendage to a shit status about how yummy the drink is, followed by a "#yummydrinksareyummy". What the fuck is hash tagging facebook statuses all about? #pricks.

Hash tagging is a parallel to the instagram filter - an attempt to trend, and be noticed. They both aim to add a gloss to what is otherwise banal. People are attempting to transverge media: the hash tag of twitter becoming appropraited on facebook whilst the characteristics of film as a medium being appropriated in digital photogaraphs.

Personally, I believe social media is a document we reflect our ego onto. Upon daily reflection of this document which is always live and present, the photograph instantly becomes part of that document from the moment it was taken (the taker knowing full well that it will be uploaded onto facebook). Knowing then that the photograph will be part of this document and posted at a date and time recorded precisely by facebook, the photograph becomes information in a document, which can be viewed at a later date and therefore even at the moment of taking the photograph, the photograph is old. And what do old photographs look like? Grainy? Discoloured? Soft? Weathered? Bingo!...the instagram app can do all that. #Beingpostmodernisbeingahipster

Immersed in a nuance of tungsten we look out for nature and all its wonderment,
Packaged in squares of plastic transparency we weigh it, pay for it, breathe in deep so as not to waste it,
Then another square of a certain transparency speaks to us, flickers at us until a remote control controls remotely.
And as we breathe nature in further in a scatter of halogen, we notice that this disembodied vision is likely to happen all over again and we reach for a square of reflective packaging, and the halogen hits the surface and the contours are warping and scattering.
We graze on the reflective squares content, one square meal.
We gaze at the square pixels on a square area, it illuminates, speaks to us,
we touch screen.