June 13, 2003

ARE Weapons : London Kings Cross Egg

The Weapons shoot everything around them with their single action trigger of retro-retard hip hop.

ARE Weapon are Sk8tr Boiz who think life is awesome. And why not? They have the world and the milky-way in a crack pipe at the moment: this Noo York electro-disco boy band in Versace gansta' hoodies have been heralded by The Strokes, Wynona Ryder and Jarvis Cocker. Svengali/manager and member Paul Sevigny is the sibling of NYC underground film starlet Chloe Sevigny fer chrissakes!!

Obviously, they are retro-fashionistas without merit? Wrong. Tonight is no denouement into velvet roped off A-listers with bowed heads over white lines and mirrors. The Weapons shoot everything around them with their single action trigger of retro-retard hip hop which combines a brilliant white trash audio- tributes to '77 proto-electronic punks Suicide from their debut album "A.R.E." Weapons (out now on Rough Trade).

Mainman and singer, Brain F. McPeck is hunched over, like a D & G robotic Ramone - giving shout-outs for all the fucked-up failed miscreants of the world. Brain embodies the male adolescent psyche with "Don't Be Scared" and "Strange Dust": his paeans to the ennui of reprobate sex, strobe-lit 80s video games and drug dealing. Bassist Matthew Macauley suffers a spaz-seizure during "Fuck You Pay Me" which knocks Brain to the stagefloor - they both rebound to "Headbanger Face": a cheap'n'nasty glam romper stomper set in a sci-fi melodramatic post-Columbine cafeteria.

ARE Weapons morph London into a post-apocalyptic teen-terror disco and with the final solution of "Hey World": an 80s pop-metal ballad of abrasive goofy screaming with amorphous bass-heavy beats which somehow combine the effortless cool arena rock of Van Halen at Wembly circa '84. And dude, that's cool, that's fucking awesome!

Paul Brownell