Thursday 22 March 2012

Pepe Deluxe - Queen of the Wave


Musical Masochism

We are looking inside the heads of two Finnish musical time-travellers and pilferers who have gathered, assimilated, pigeon-holed – sometimes quite haphazardly and daftly – reassembled, dismantled, synthesised, lost, part-found, destroyed, injected with helium, consulted through imaginary operatic osmosis with Pete Townsend, plagiarised, deconstructed from a merging of Abba and The Beatles, psychedelicised, and then threw into the air and let fall through the assemblage of "The Great Stalacpipe Organ" (the largest musical instrument in the world), Edison's "Ghost Machine", Professor A.D. Conrow's "Psychical Predictor" and a 500 000 volt Tesla Coil Synthesizer, as the band’s website explains.

The result? An interrogative lacking the slightest aural foothold from which to provide a smidgeon of a sensible answer. An intuitive first response is to acknowledge that it engages and amuses. The madness of the method is impressive on the one hand, but disorienting on the other. For this listener, opener Queenswave introduces a modernised psychedelia that fully engages but which doesn’t last – obviously – as the contemporary operatic quest moves through its multitude of distorted influences. Depending on the musical era of your inclination – or planet of origin – you will be hooked by a snippet of reinvented musical mayhem, and then left aroused but possibly unsatisfied as the spaced-out spaceship moves quickly on.

If your musical masochism is to invite an aural pummelling, this is your violent visitor come with a gargantuan guffaw and gavel. 

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