ATUM SUSTENIDO

We Have Band
Demos
2009

We Have Band are unsigned, and undeniable - there’s no denying the cold wave of sound that breaks from the stage whenever they play, for example at Adventures Close to Home last month, and the heat generated by their four demos, which remind us of the Human League after the girls joined, or Depeche Mode after Vince Clarke left. Their MySpace friends include ESG, Metronomy, !!! (chk chk chk) and Arthur Russell, the latter particularly impressive because said avant-disco legend is dead. They describe themselves as “a disco-rock trio”, claim they “wear their influences like a flak jacket” and reckon they sound like elephants. Not elephants doing the fandango, or elephants on acid. Just elephants. Hear It in the Cans features male-female vocals like all the great synthpop groups and a ping-pong rhythm that recalls that Atari tennis game kids played in the late 70s. You’ve Had Band is bleak house - not as in the Dickens novel but as in dark dance music. It’s almost goth-ic, with an infectious, insistent rhythm like Bauhaus doing the watusi at Bela Lugosi’s wake. It’s their anti-theme song, “anti” because it appears to signal the end of something rather than a bright beginning. “We’ve been around,” one of the boys in WHB blankly intones like an emotional robot, “it’s time to leave.” There’s also the frantic Oh, which sounds like Kraftwerk running for the bus, and You Came Out which is as good, that is to say as dryly sexy, as lascivious and laconic, as New Young Pony Club, plus it’s got whistling towards the end which adds to the sense of poignant alienation. Despite all these references to electronic musicians past and present, the great thing about We Have Band songs is that they’d sound just as good being strummed by a hairy busker down Tottenham Court Road tube. That’s not an invitation, beardy bloke in We Have Band, it’s an observation. (Source: The Gaurdian)

myspace | tester (zshare) | video: You Came Out