Black and white is always better.
There is a fundamental problem with 6is9’s first punky shout to the world. It’s clean. Not like It’s had a going over with jif, but the sound is sanitized and polished and every instrument can be heard well. In pretty much every genre of music, this would be a good thing, but not punk.
Punk is dirty. Punk is ugly. Punk should sound like a fight in a chip shop against tramps with guitars used as weapons.
Anachronistic punks.
Steampunk is a slippery concept . At once literary tradition, design style and fashion statement. And now, increasingly – music genre. But how does a band capture and create the sound of a time that never existed? How can you classify something as steampunk when your source material is disparate fiction? Well, you just do it and see what happens…
And until now I never really agreed with any band calling themselves steampunk – Abney Park, although awesome are a little too electronic, Unextraodinary Gentlemen, too experimental and Thomas Truax, well he’s kind of odd.
But now there is Ghostfire who sound like what would happen if you stuck The Cure, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a steam organ and Tom Waits into a blender, and dressed the result in brass goggles, top hats and told them to entertain a drunken punk crowd.
That laboured metaphor can boil down to three words ‘they sound fantastic.’
Urrrrrghhh. Ruuuughhhh. Repeat.
“Umm, yeah, this song is called RAGUGGGELLWUGH!!!” Says the tubby funster fronting opening act Fleshrot. Ah, yes, the calling card of bloody boring brutal death metal – a lack of any personality. Yeah, the songs have some cool blasts, and I’m sure the solos are all fine, but a muddy sound and no real tightness produce something that rarely can distract from the fact that the Purple Turtle smells like cthulhus arsehole. A big meh to them.
