ONEHUNDREDMINUTESPERHOUR – 5 song demo

(download, self-released)

What a fucking suprise! I popped a little disc into my player, expecting something, I don’t know what, but definitely not a heavy but grooving bass like the one Henry Rollins likes to use in his band and a crazy crooner sounding like Ian Astbury doing Elvis high on psycho-pharmaca. Thinking about it, that is what Astbury probably does all the time, but, yeah, whatever. These four young men from Vienna fuse a mixture of one hundred percent distilled and clean ingredients into an incredible mix of pounding post-core, the heaviest funk and a certain kind of craziness that leaves with maturity. I hope they never grow up. That’s what happens when hippie parents take their underage kids to noiserock shows: a few years later they’ll be pounding out incredible shit. Let me mention just two more references to make you feel the tickle of upcoming greatness in the back of your spine: Mr. Bungle and Mike Patton. Okay, so that is actually just one reference, but this is the game we are playing here. Alright, so I still have one good here, how about Mars Volta? Before they became stupid posers, that is.

Weirdness goes a long way if it is paired with the fire of ingenuity and don’t give a shitness. I have already mentioned the grooving hammerlock that is the first song of the five you can download for free on their website, “New Cars & Hairspray”, but did I mention the gagging sounds and breathless vocals during the bridge section of that song? Then it is off into weirder areas, also musically, with strange rhythms and stop-and-go arrangements. While “Courtney Love” dissolves into a multilayered crooner song towards the end, with opposing detriments and love affairs towards the blonde widow, the next song, “Imagine you’re a cop”, sports a big ass trumpet in love with the rhythm section. The trumpet is obviously played by the singer, because this is an instumental. A lot of the fascination of this band comes from the disparity between the Rollins-Band kickass sound and the full Elvis-vocals, which in more than one way don’t fit, but in other more meaningful ones do a lot. But it is this gap that makes and breaks the fascination. “I taste the wine and you pay” plays with that, a lot. There is a darkness and some evil in this disparity, which accountrs for approximately 73.5 % of the sombre or downright dark atmosphere this stomper evades. Last song “...is it you philip?” is back to even weirder beaches.

Mostly, I like how they don’t give a fuck about expectations. Two of the songs are instrumentals that check each other for who gets further on top of the weirdometer. They mix things that don’t fit each other and they shake and kick them until they do. Then they are being polished so nobody will see where they are broken. Next on, they certainly look like they come directly from some university town in New England, when actually they are from right around the corner. (I hear they have art university of Vienna backgrounds, sounds convincing.) But forget about cultural imperialism from the US, this should be working the other way around. Somebody should open his wallet and hand a few thousand bucks to some big ass producer to give these boys a chance to produce their own “Relationship of Commans”, “killing in the name of” or even “Real Thing”. Next thing, I want to see them play live, and they better turn up their volume to eleven so everybody in this goddamn town can hear them. Then the road is clear to burning down big stadiums, girls tattooing their logo onto their arms and crowds of people following them wherever they go. And that is the worst case scenario. For a band that is able to condense time by a factor of 1.66 nothing is impossible.

www.onehundredminutes.com
11/2007