Podcast 3 Featuring Errors, Stanley Brinks, Gummi Bako and Wounded Knee)
By Milo | August 31, 2008
Podcast 3 (featuring Errors, Stanley Brinks, Gummi Bako and Wounded Knee)
Employee of the Month – Brainwave Corrupted
Call
it jazz or post-rock if you like, and it’s true that Edinburgh band
Employee of the Month bear comparison to the likes of Boards of Canada
and Tortoise, but their hyper-modern aesthetic is all their own. What’s
even more striking is how well the band recreate their recorded sound
live. From the pristinely produced Brainwave EP, this track is crying out to be used to soundtrack a film with similarly innovative, mind-blowing visuals.
Stanley Brinks – Stanley Brinks
The
artist formerly known as Andre from the band Herman Düne no longer
plays live with his brothers, though he contributed a number of
gorgeous tunes to their last album Giant. Since leaving he
has reinvented himself as Stanley Brinks, a self-proclaimed ‘enemy of
society’ and an amusingly unlikely moniker for a Frenchman. This song
is an autobiographical statement of independence, detailing his life
right up to the transformation into his new persona.
Gummi Bako -I’m Depressed
Let’s
face it, without the odd dose of depression most songwriters wouldn’t
have produced half of their output. Here, Gummi seems to have the
bakery-related blues (“too much hot-cross loving”), but then things
take an abrupt turn for the positive as he sings “I wanna go
ballooning, right up past the Moon and Mars, and get lost amongst a
million billion drillion, zillion super-shiny shooting stars” and you
realise he has the ability to free himself from adversity through
sheer, glorious absurdity.
Wounded Knee – Anthem for the Call Centre Worker
Some
might say that it is the shortsighted economic policy of the past that
has led to a large proportion of Scotland’s workforce being qualified
to do little else other than man the phones. Working in a call centre
is, on the whole, low-skilled, low-paid work with an extremely high
staff turnover – due to the fact it is soul-destroying in the extreme.
Edinburgh’s Wounded Knee takes the corporate-speak of the robot voices
that greet us on the other end of the line and reclaims them as a call
to arms for all downtrodden customer service representatives. Using his
sublime skills with repeating vocal loops, he transforms a common
depression into a perversely uplifting anthem.
First published in the May 2008 issue of The Skinny and on their website.
Comments are closed.