You know [a]Medal[/a], don’t you? Their faces uncreased by laughter, their demeanours dour, their music relentlessly mining those [a]Longpigs[/a] [a]Darkstar[/a] Nights of the Soul, they could quite easily be lost in the post-Radiohead, none-more-glum stampede.
But halt! Withhold your rotten tomatoes, o tireless, wanton seekers of sonic nirvana! For [a]Medal[/a] wrap said caterwaulings in deliciously narcotic walls of oppressive, breathtaking white noise! Dizzying swathes of manhandled, mistreated guitar churning and writhing in gilded torrents of head-trip psychedelia! On ‘Poncenby Smythe’, they make like the most maddening headache you ever had; on ‘Porno Song’ they’re Portishead‘s paranoiac groove underpinning Mercury Rev‘s rudest flowerings.
Without fear, without shame, without recourse to stadium histrionics, [a]Medal[/a] ROCK!!! Pity, then, that the whole experience is ultimately so emotionally unmoving. There’s a tedious blankness at the centre of [a]Medal[/a]’s ennui. That they eschew any recognised form of performance, in favour of intermittently flicking on their (major-label financed) strobe light, is one reason. That they inform their gratuitous ‘suffering’ with little in the way of pathos, inviting nothing more than a grouchy ‘cheer up, you sour-faced old bugger’, is another.
Two instrumentals, ‘Visit Your Local Taxidermist’ and ‘Get Spencer’, reveal a welcome, humanising shade of black humour. [a]Medal[/a] are at their most erudite when their mouths are closed.