Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Humans Are Stupid
Behind this amusingly whimsical band name are some serious talents: multi-instrumentalists David Bowater and Rob Sinclair were in Schtung in the late Seventies then Big Sideways and 3 Voices in the Eighties and much more recently delivered the quirky Price of Fish album.
Also here are classical composer Helen Bowater (piano, vocals) and lyric writer Andrew Caldwell.
Needless to say out of that collision of diverse musicians and ideas, EVO create music which conforms to no fixed genre but rather roams freely between avant-poetry, the idiom-fluid sounds on the Eighties Unsung label (Big Sideways, Avant Garage, 3 Voices etc) and left-field jazz-cum-pop.
A few pieces are revisions of previously recorded pieces but here come off as new considerations.
Peacock Sunday with Helen Bowater on vocals and piano is an interesting, moody art music piece of slithery poetry (a lengthy lyric sheet would be helpful), a distant hornpipe and sax passages and . . .
For Creepy Undermind imagine Steely Dan in rehearsal being interrupted by an itinerant poet and someone with a untamed synthesiser; Animal Love is an enjoyable slice of funk-lite pop with vaguely rap-like delivery of the animorphic (is that the opposite of anthropomorphic?) lyrics; Buried Alive could find a place on alternative radio open to funk-pop as imagined by jazz musicians.
Darwin's Machine could come perilously close to a radio playlist also.
Poontang is described as “an aria from a yet to be written space opera” although musically sounds more grounded somewhere in South East Asian music and the narrative has a really nasty vengeful streak . . .
Yes, a melange of styles and sounds, ideas and angles . . .
And the final track is a silly piece of the kind you might find if Frank Zappa had joined the Aunties.
It's called Humans Are Stupid.
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You can hear this album at Spotify here
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