We all know how there is only so much madness collected in one place in one time and levels slip and rise in patient/staff relations, so it all gets a little blurry who the patient is and the professional line goes wooo yeh, quantity theory of insanity, and the party gets a little wild.

You want to know what the nurse’s favorite part was?

Die Todliche Doris – Tanz Im Quadrat

Die Todliche Doris do krazy doctor karaoke! So as the nurse injects the medication into your arm, the doctor by now has turned into some kind of fluorescent monkey perched on her back and he’s barking the lyrics to this vicious bitch of a song at you. He’s also bought along his acordian but he can’t play too good (because hey, he’s a monkey) so he just pumps away on it in an obscene fashion. This all really happened on saturday night in casualty (xxjfsteve says).

We have to thank the nice people over at Flaky Disco for pointing us in the direction of the Berlin Super 80 compilation and dvd from which this comes, which we highly recomend you spend your pocket money on this week kids.

And now some works from our good friend, Nick on Devo and Jupiter Ace…

Devo – U Got Me Bugged (original version)

This is the weirdest song you’ll ever hear.

It doesn’t help that it sounds like a shot at music your hairdryer put together with your answerphone while you were asleep.

In 1974.

In a lab.

And if you can actually make out any of Mark Mothersbaugh’s lyrics, which he is unhelpfully ring modulating through his brother Bob’s cone hat (probably), you’ll find no reference to the still recent Watergate smoking pistols, but rather a queasy little excuse for a love poem.

Very paeanful…

Cos love for Devo ain’t a juicy big peach in a lunchbox, it’s a moldy old bowl of fruit for Booji boy fruit flies to breed on. “I should have trusted suck-fear and now you’ve sucked out all my blood” he sings merrily, over a primitive machine melody from the planet Akron.

The fact that this song is pointing at you and laughing separates its sorry little pseudo-misogyny from the rest of the spudboys, it’s sheer gallows humour in the face of Devo-lution. They wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, pinhead!

Production note: This song predates any unsatisfactory collaborations with Eno or Roy Thomas Baker, it is the rawest Devo ever sounded, its the worm in the apple core y’all.

Jupiter Ace – We’ve Got the Time

In sharpish contrast, Jupiter Ace wants to laugh with you, not at you; “We’ve Got The Time” is immediate, sweet-toothed, joyous electropop from the heavens. In the video he never made, he is floating in his funny beard and trainers though a technicolor toy town sky with stick-on weather report clouds and hot air balloons.

Or sthg.

And to think in reality he lives in Lisburn, Northern Ireland; a dismal shithole, if ever there was one…

Tangy Casio saw-tooth melodies, lemon fresh 303 snares, a bitter sweet auto-tuned vocal, this thing sounds so damn *clean* you can actually hear each note surface finished by the giant air blasting machine that stands behind the music. A song to rival Kraftwerk’s Pine-apple symphony in terms of mouth-watering taste alone.

A nice gin and tonic, four cubes of ice, and a slice o’ lime.

How does that sound, sir?

Stop press: this version hails from 2002, apparently Mr. Gregory Jupiter Ace is rerecording it for his imminent debut album…

Indeed, thank you Nick, and thank you Hardcore Devo Volume 2 (1974-77), now over to the broken soul of steve…

XXJFSteve is broken! Yeah, it was all tendons vs bones and the tendons won, so now I’m laid up in the penthouse suite of xxjfg Towers with nothing but the internet and Horror films to keep me company and my robot slaves fetching me stuff. I don’t even have some cool plaster cast that people can graf up, I’ve got some crappy sock thing, damn. Plus I’m doped up on the meds so I’ll try not to go all weird and start posting Girls Aloud or some such shit. No promises though…

Delia & Gavin go pop? An homage to John Carpenter circa ‘Escape From New York’? Zombies crawled from the abyss and given microphone and drum machine? Yeah all those things, its chromatics!

Chromatics- Hands In The Dark (Demo)

This is a cover of a track by RL Crutchfield’s Dark Day who we featured last week (are Chromatics taking very fast pointers from xxjfg?) and is as sparse, pitch-dark and glacial as it rightly should be. Yeah its Delia & Gavin condensing their 12 minute epics into a 4 minute pop crystal, yeah it has that familiar John Carpenter dead-disco throb that xxjfg can’t get enough of throughout and, yeah if you listen closely you can hear the skin flaking off these zombies as they shuffle through this fresh demo. You heard me right, its only a demo, w00t!, produced by Johnny Jewel of Glass Candy.

2006 looks like the year when these bands take over the world and its neighbouring planets, and possibly even make it over to the UK…? Maybe.

In related news, Glass Candy have begun bestowing all of they’re demos upon us via the band’s fansite Crystal Migraine, so delete those Arctic Monkeys mp3s off of ya hard-drive cos you’ve gotta make room for the good shit like this magical little dancing puppy…

They Came From The Stars I Saw Them – The Unstoppable Kite (live)

With a band formed by various djs/punters/misfits at The Kosmiche Club in London who had little or no musical ability between them to start with the multi instrumentalist constantly revolving line-up of They Came From The Stars has become a wonder to behold. They can simultaneously be the best and worst band on the planet, and manage that amazing thing of never being dull.

Going from single of the week on the Radio 1 Mark and Lard show, to not having a record deal has to be some sort of comment on their anarchistic da da ism and lack of ability from the record industry in the uk to see beyond its own arse and figure out how to market this spectacular musical project. The kind of fans they have after seeing them live become obsessive and will defend the band to the death against the haters and musical dullards world wide.

Unstoppable Kite is a live recording from The Stars and hits home like the kind of pop the Silver Apples make (unpop?) driven by what Horton describes as a trance. Frantic early Eno-esque vocals compete for attention with a chaotic mesh of rhythmic melodies, suck your face off radiophonic beeps and swirls, all singing, all dancing and then that crazy buzzer noise from tv gameshow hell. You couldn’t make this shit up – but The Came From The Stars I Saw Them do on a regular basis, insane bastards. Any fans of Caribou looking for something more will so fall in love this.

Big respect to Mr.Tim who is taking on the (not trouble-free) task of sound engineering The Stars when they play live for us in Brighton at thedoclub.

We feel privileged to have at thedoclub this Friday 17th Febuary at the Core Club in Brighton The Stars (and they are), as well as an exclusive screening of the new Liars dvd for Drums Not Dead from 10pm as well as playing (at least) one Liars song every half hour, phew! What a night!

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with acordian bitch blurry casualty cat shop insanity john carpenter karaoke kosmische krazy monkey nurse patient staff professional line pumps quadrat quantity theory radiophonic saturday night staff relations tanz wooo