So So Modern - Crude Futures

So So Modern
Crude Futures

On first hearing this album, I smiled because this four-piece from New Zealand are obviously having a lot of fun. Granted, everyone has a different idea of ‘fun’, so elements of this debut might not appeal to you. However, these guys definitely get their kicks from making the music they want to make; a frolicking, noisy, musical journey where anything from punk to electronica to rock to downright absurdness goes. Fair play to them.

If you’re a sucker for drums, you’ll enjoy opening track, ‘Life In The Undergrowth’. Background vocals whoop in and out of moody, pulsating guitar and those aforementioned beats rock and build tension. Like the final level on an 80′s computer game, the track warps into a digitalised battlefield, shooting down spaceships here, there and everywhere.

But the noise suddenly and shockingly shifts into a nightmarish waltz on the next track, ‘The Worst Is Yet To Come’. Surely this is a play on words as it is the worst song on the album. It immediately shifts any preconceptions about their sound and challenges their place in any genre. It’s performed with a smile, I bet. If you enjoy higgledy-piggledy fairground music where screams and bleeps come at you from all angles, this track is for you.

Saying that, don’t be put off. Pushing boundaries is what this album does best. So So Modern enjoy expressive freedom through performance and music; they’ve just finished a European tour, at times taking to the stage in vibrant all-in-one-suits. Their back catalogue of colourful EPs proves you have to expect the unexpected with this band. Crude Futures, which sports two men with long hair and face-paints on the cover, is no different in this approach. The album release will coincide with a major exhibition of the same name by New Zealand documentary photographer John Lake. They state that the album explores the burden of optimism in a constantly ‘apocalyptic’ reality.

There are a few things you can be sure of with this band; brilliant drumming, a mish-mash of sounds and harmonised vocals, when they appear. ‘Be Anywhere’ is full of dream-like rifts and steady rhythms (for a moment anyway), a sort of ode to the traveller, walking and hooting about the place – definitely one to rewind. The following track is also very worthy of repeat: ‘Berlin’, an instrumental Led Zeppelin-esque stomper with psychedelic moments that you want to hear live there and then. ‘Holiday’ and ‘Island Hopping/Channel Crossing’ are upbeat, summery vibes, continuing the exploring nature the band possess. For this reason, it is hard to relate So So Modern to anyone else; perhaps Incubus for that drifting beach-baby sound in the last two mentioned tracks. Still, they are strangely in their own space and time zone, addicted to electric pulses – just how they like it.

You never quite understand what the songs are about between yelps and howls – presumably picked up from their local natives. This does get quite repetitive by the closing track but you almost forgive So So Modern for their sheer energy. Listening to Crude Futures, released on the aptly independent Transgressive Records, is quite exhausting. It’s a real whirlwind of an album, how it continually morphs. But it is refreshing to hear a band so far away from being automatic, so you come away smiling. So So Modern are simply happy being themselves and putting it out there. You can almost see the band rolling around their beautiful homeland, having a laugh, throwing all sorts of musical tastes into the mix and drawing on this plethora of influences to style their wild-child image. Go into the album with an open mind and expect something that rattles the norms – and let the games begin.

By Kristina Georgiou

Crude Futures is out now on Transgressive Records.