Alpha Male Tea Party: Droids

Merseyside math-proggers’ gleefully wrong-footing second album.

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Here’s a band who would surely never join any party that would have them as members. They’re from Liverpool but stress that they “don’t sound like a Liverpool band”.

And their latest single is entitled You Eat Hummus, Of Course You Listen To Genesis. That bloody-minded determination to confound expectations is clear here.

Happy As Larry, Larry Is Dead and Judas The Tenderiser take the traditional rock riff, make it hop, skip and jump until your natural sense of rhythm is in knots, but still make for strangely riveting hooks. A theme of this album, they claim, is that the daily grind of work is turning us into a nation of automatons. Not the easiest concept to convey when you’re an instrumental band, but that’s made up for by highly expressive song titles like Haven’t Had A Lunch Break Since Windows Vista Came Out and Your Happiness Was Stored On A Hard Drive And Is Now Corrupt. For all the techy terms there’s nothing clinical about their sound – they’re belting hell out of their instruments on tracks like Athlete’s Face and aforementioned Judas The Tenderiser. A scouse Mars Volta? Why, we wouldn’t dare try to categorise them in such simplistic terms.

Via Superstar Destroyer

Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock