Fight Like Apes: Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion (Shock)

 |   |  1 min read

Fight Like Apes: Something Global
Fight Like Apes: Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion (Shock)

What we forget, because history is reductive, is that for every Beatles there were a dozen bands like the Merseybeats, for every Clash probably 20 like Sham 69 or UK Subs, for every Nirvana . . .

What those other bands do, aside from add breadth (if not depth) to a style or period, is provide immeasurable pleasure, albeit one-off in some cases. Also, without someone like Jewel we might forget how deeply talented and different someone like Joni Mitchell is. We need these points of comparison. 

And so to Fight Like Apes, a four-piece out of Dublin whose raucous pop-rock with electronic twiddles owes as much to Avril Lavigne's skate-punk as it does to Siouxsie and the Banshees, as much to likeable Ting Tings pop as to Sonic Youth's noisy thrash. They are pop, punk, alt and rock.

They have humour (song titles include I'm Beginning to Think You Prefer 90210 To Me, Snore Bore Whore and Lumpy Dough) and attitude (you wouldn't want to be the Jake Summers who is the target of the song of the same name) and they bristle with energy and excitement on this their debut studio album (recorded in Seattle with John Goodmanson who knob-twiddled for Death Cab For Cutie, Sleater-Kinney and other worthies).

That said, this has a flash/pan quality and while they will doubtless go on to better things (or disappear) this is enjoyable for its enthusiasm more than any other inherent qualities.

They do write a good pop hook and songs such as Do You Like Karate?, Something Global and Jake Summers -- already released as singles in Ireland -- deserve to be all over alt.radio.

The more I listened to and enjoyed this, the more I thought: every generation deserves its Turning Japanese

 

Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   Music at Elsewhere articles index

Vanishing Twin: Ookii Gekkou (Fire/digital outlets)

Vanishing Twin: Ookii Gekkou (Fire/digital outlets)

This multi-culti British outfit around Cathy Lucas impressed us with their previous album The Age of Immunology in 2019 (prescient title, huh?) It was lightlydelic simmer of influences from... > Read more

The Low Spark: Out in the Ozone (LowSpark)

The Low Spark: Out in the Ozone (LowSpark)

Dunno about you but I'd always rather hear the young, enthusiastic, overstated, lightly misguided, energetic debut from a band than being bored witless by their fourth album. Fact is though that... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

NILS-HENNING ORSTED PEDERSEN INTERVIEWED (2001): All basses covered

NILS-HENNING ORSTED PEDERSEN INTERVIEWED (2001): All basses covered

Think jazz and you invariably think the saxophone. Or trumpet. Or piano. Rarely does the acoustic bass, that pulse and often warm soul of this difficult improvised art form, come to mind.... > Read more

MEAT PUPPETS INTERVIEWED (1989): Disney avant-metal rock

MEAT PUPPETS INTERVIEWED (1989): Disney avant-metal rock

It's an old truism and therefore probably quite false, but it goes like this; ask musicians their influences and you can pick their sound. It certainly doesn't hold up when you speak to Curt... > Read more