Who or what is Madnomad? A freedom-fighting pyromaniac in a Panama hat? A dirty-suited emotional conman who offers you his heart, then shows you his penis? A feeling that everything is wrong; that bullies and rapists, powdered pimps and smug, self-satisfied CEOs have annexed our world, shot the dissenters, castrated the lovers and repopulated the planet with self-replicating hermaphrodite cyborgs whose only interest in life is fucking themselves stupid and not asking any questions. It’s all these things and more.
Madnomad is a band: a strutting, honking, strangely-attired, many-limbed entity and one of most unique live acts you’ll ever see. Madnomad is a self-styled “Entertainment Product”: a dark pantomime falling somewhere between a satire on the cult of personality and a small-scale reconstruction of the Nuremberg Rallies. Madnomad is also a phenomenon: witness the word-of-mouth reaction to the first Community Festival performance from people who’d usually be downing vodka and Red Bull in some godawful chrome and glass slapperdrome.
Let’s make one thing clear. The Madnomad represented by 'Tamper Evident' is a different beast altogether. The sound is slicker and more ordered, the tone more introspective. Sure, it’s largely the same set of songs you’ve heard at the shows, but away all from the hysteria and noise, you get closer to the emotional core. It is at once more organised and mechanised than the live experience, yet at the same time the human elements are more starkly exposed. Sampled confessionals ('Period', '35 Summers') and misanthropic character sketches ('Direct Evidence Against Uniqueness') sit alongside noisy live classics like 'Let’s Kill The Pig', which sounds like Body Count remixed by The Chemical Brothers, and 'Gun of Sod', the only song in history to sample both the political fury of Bill Hicks and the white noise of My Bloody Valentine.
'Thanx' appears in remixed form, slightly longer than before and more mangled and frantic than ever. Listening to it is a bit like having root canal surgery during a migraine. Then there are two songs featuring Chikinki’s singer, Rupert - 'Is it This?', with its fabulously wonky bassline and Preacher/Rock God vocals, and the title track 'Tamper Evident', a melancholy piece which works much better in this context than it ever has live, probably because you can hear what the boy’s saying for once.
In terms of sheer songwriting class, the two drop-dead standout moments of the album are 'Ad Nauseam' and 'The Drunkard’s Song'. The first, known better to Madnomad devotees as 'Assholes', is a sleazy evocation of Sartre’s maxim that hell is other people. It’s a social catastrophe with horns; a rant of disgust at the crawling cesspit of cruelty we blush to call the world. The second, a beautiful, heartbreaking account of the abusive love affair between (wo)man and bottle, is one of the few truly great songs about addiction; up there with Dylan’s 'Moonshiner' and Lou Reed’s 'Heroin' in its penetration of the subject. The song’s agonising conclusion is a howling guitar and sax cacophony every bit as devastating as the blood-curdling scream which ends the song live. It’s enough to put you off your pint.
'Tamper Evident' isn’t the cheeriest thing you’ll hear this year but it’s a great record. From the tragically human to the savagely inhumane, it delivers an emotional palette beginning in blue and ending in black, tempered by some wonderfully eccentric music and a killer sense of humour. In Madnomad’s world, it seems, everybody’s free to feel bad.
Originally published in Choke, Issue 10
No comments:
Post a Comment