December 4, 2004
Help She Can't Swim : Bunty Vs Beano
She might not be able to float, but she can make great Happy Shopper Pulp
I have absolutely no idea who Help She Can’t Swim are, but what a fantastic name – the exact words, in fact, that I hollered to a heartless boatswain moments before the all-too-early demise of my first wife. ‘Bunty Vs Beano’ seems to be an enraged polemic about gender role conditioning (‘it’s a bad thing’ being what I perceive to be the gist) but it is so insanely shouty and bug-eyed in its art-thrash mania that it’s actually difficult to make out the finer details. It sounds a bit like Pulp might if they were 15 years old and only owned £10 guitars and £5 amplifiers, and it’s absolutely bloody sodding brilliant. “Frank Skinner! Michael Winner!” they shout at one point, and I know exactly what they’re getting at.
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