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Robots In DisguiseGet Rid! Recall Group/Shock In the same way that the Pixies were inadvertently responsible for a thousand shite bands enamoured of their soft/loud dynamic but with none of their subtlety or craft, so too have Chicks On Speed a legacy to answer to. For all of the Chicks' charm, their sampler + guitars + shouty female vocals equation has led to an overabundance of bands adopting the template who understood the sound, but none of the wit. Case in point: Robots In Disguise. If I'd heard this before I'd heard the Chicks, Peaches, Cobra Killer, Miss Kittin, Le Tigre et al then maybe - maybe - 'Get Rid!' would have sounded original and fresh. However, as the above list demonstrates, the main thing that those artists have in common, aside from a love of the odd shout, is the ability to write catchy, memorable, interesting songs. Meanwhile, Robots In Disguise offer up slogans in place of songs (Girl) and a robot logo that looks enough like 'Futurama''s Bender for Matt Groening to sue. It's not that it's all terrible: Turn It Up matches a brooding bassline to a litany of favourite records (including the Smiths' 'Hatful Of Hollow', the Sex Pistols' Pretty Vacant and - unsurprisingly - Peaches' 'The Teaches Of Peaches'), and the comedic The DJ's Got A Gun is also kind of cute, while She's A Colour Scientist gets extra points for saucily rhyming "badge" with "vadge". Meanwhile, Mirror Mirror sounds for all the world like a lesser entry buried toward the end of the 'Pretty In Pink' soundtrack and their cover of The Kinks You Really Got Me is simply baffling: it neither reinvents nor subverts the song, yet is far too genuinely awful to possibly be an authentic tribute. That said, I'm not expecting to encounter a band with a better name this year.  |
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