En garde!

Today I am a spirit emerging from the woods like the girl turned assassin to avenge her honour in Baby Cart in Peril, my favourite lone wolf and cub movie.

I’ve got the tattoo of a baby in one breast, I flash it, just to distract you…

There, the Plastics, sweet as toddlers, what can I say about them? I first learned about this band through Manuel at Dolby Surrender, and to be honest I don’t know how have I lived so many years without them…funny new wave pop that under its charming surface hides as many twists and turns as a pond full of kappa.

Plastics- Robot

In the track we are posting today, included in their first UK 7”, out in Rough Trade, you can hear Devo’s mongoloid wisdom and the Talking Head’s despair at modern life’s absurdity holding hands with the electro-pop of kraftwerk and YMO, bouncing happily in the discotheque, suddenly they turn around, ‘there’s not much production today, there’s not much communication, you are robot’, they say deadpan, piercing you with a nuclear powered Ian Curtis gaze as if they were the japanese version of the kids in Village of the Damned.

That was 1979. The future was then, and they weren’t following, they were leading.

I got you distracted, now it’s time for the fatal blow, I jump around baring my back, the terrifying tattoo of an evil monster hangs in there ready to chew and spit your brain, your body, your knees, your spine and your marrow. It will eat your heart.

(Scary eh?)

A whirlind has struck your house and the foundations have sunk and the cat has jumped on top of your head and the bills have come out of the envelopes and started biting your toes like little vampires and you don’t know if you’re gonna fly to oz or sink in hell, when your mum comes in the room and slaps a Melt Banana tape in the stereo you realise that things aren’t gonna get any calmer for a while.

Melt Banana- Mind Thief

This is off 13 Hedgehogs (any relation to Lightning Bolt’s smashing ’13 monsters’?), Melt Banana’s recently released compilation of 1994-1999 singles, it sounds fresher than tomorrow and fiercer than a 12 year old after drinking a thermos full of petrol thick coffee, Yasuko O’s voice is the best pneumatic drill ever invented, the rusty fang of a deranged rythm monster that squeals and pounds and grinds you down gabber gabber gabber hey, as Dr. Carrington put it in ‘The Thing from Another World’, which I very much enjoyed watching last night,

‘The creature X is more powerful, more intelligent than us. We are infants beside him. He regards us as soft, vulnerable earth worms important only for his nourishment. He has the same attitude toward us as we have toward a field of cabbages’.

Melt Banana are in this planet to kill us all and eat us, or drive us insane, or make us dance and feed off the energy of our spazzing bodies like an electric vampire, maybe it’s all the same, anyway, we have to thank them for that.

Not you reader, the monster tattoo terrified you, you lowered your guard and now I’ve sunk my plastic banana in your belly.

Say hi to Elvis from me. Yeah, the heaven is in Mars, didn’t you know that?

(PS- check out the Losing my Edge post at Banana Nutrament if you haven’t yet, these guys are my gods!)

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with 13 Monsters baby cart deadpan electro pop evil monster fatal blow gonna fly hedgehogs japanese version little vampires lone wolf and cub mind thief mongoloid plastics robot tattoo village of the damned wolf and cub ymo