What? What! What?!’ is how one of the songs on Things To Do begins, and I must confess to being similarly confused myself while listening to this record by Disco Drive.
Disco Drive – Things To Do
http://www.discodrive.org/ http://www.myspace.com/discodrivepunk http://www.konkurrent.nl/
What? What! What?!’ is how one of the songs on Things To Do begins, and I must confess to being similarly confused myself while listening to this record by Disco Drive. Lyrically enigmatic, and with multifarious bizarre noises littered throughout, this is demented, but ultimately pretty fun, music. My guess would be that Disco Drive like to make noise – a diverse range of loud noise. And as this record plays through I imagine that the band sat in a bland room, electronic equipment piled in front of them, and thought to themselves ‘I wonder what sonic irregularities we can conjure here?’
The album opens with a computerised high-pitched howling sound, and at various points throughout the songs break into hectic jumbles of chaos. Flower Stall throbs with pulsating guitars and It’s A Long Way To The Top contains a bouncing bass line and a discordant mid-song aural lashing which sounds as if it was created by throwing amplifiers against walls. Similarly, Gonna Love This ends drenched in feedback and reverb while What Are You Talking About And Why Are You Talking About It? is as bizarre as the name suggests. The chanted, surreal lyrics add to the enigma of the proceedings. ‘Cut my tongue out/at the flower stall’ is one example of such, from Flower Stall. Something here is reminiscent of Gang Of Four – partly the angular precision of some of the songs, and partly the spoken delivery of the words. Often words and phrases are repeated again and again in a song, augmenting the clinical atmosphere, with the result that the vocals act as an additional instrument rather than as a story-telling device.
This is not a deep or sentimental record, but it is easy to get carried away with these up-tempo songs, even if it is not necessarily obvious what the songs are actually about. Things To Do has enough energy, and moments where you are left wondering what on earth is happening, to make it interesting.Words: Craig Pearce