Fight Like Apes - Crouching Bees

Fact: The first ever new music post on Breaking More Waves was about Irish crazy-kids Fight Like Apes. It was the fifth post in total, after an introduction piece, a discussion on the future of UK festivals and two festival reviews. Those first posts paved the way for the next 2000+ articles, with new music becoming the prime focus, the occasional discussion piece and come summer some festival coverage.

Now at post number 2090 here are Fight Like Apes again and we’re pleased to confirm they’re still a bit bonkers – after all we couldn’t imagine James Blake / Bon Iver / The XX or any of the other new-serious artists announcing that their new EP was called Whigfield Sextape. We wonder if it was recorded on a Saturday Night?

From the EP comes Crouching Bees, a tune that’s less violently brash than the material they were releasing when we first wrote about them. And even if it doesn’t pack the same punch as songs like the virulent punk pop of Jake Summers or Lend Me Your Face there’s still enough to keep the ears engaged, from lyrics of “coming up on street drugs,” and “ playing a lady for today,” to the shiny oriental sounding synth riffs that pepper the tune. The Whigfield Sextape EP will be released through Alcopop records in May – a label which makes a lot of sense for the band to be on.

Fight Like Apes - Crouching Bees

Fight Like Apes - Poached Eggs

When we started this blog some of the first music that we featured prominently was the warped aggression from Irish electro-pop crazy kids Fight Like Apes. We likened them to a pumped up fist f*ck against the wall of a pub, under CCTV cameras with your mum and dad watching from the other side of the street. Now it’s time to bend over and take another pummelling, because Fight Like Apes are back with a second album. “None of that sophomore effort nonsense please,” the band wisely announced via their website. Just say ‘second’ and stop using the thesaurus. It’s entitled The Body of Christ and the Legs of Tina Turner and is due for release on August 27th through Model Citizen. With titles such as Pull Off Your Arms And Let’s Play In Your Blood and Kathmandu (Face It, You’re Caviar, I’m Hotdogs) it’s a fairly safe bet that the band haven’t sold out. In fact it wouldn’t surprise us if whilst they’ve been away they sneaked into your house dressed in fishnets, smeared mayo and blood all over the bed and did a little squat-wee on the carpet. They’re that kind of band.

Here’s a track from the album entitled Poached Eggs. “I’m sorry for being so gay today, you spilled your poached eggs all over my duvet,” sings Maykay before the group add a repeated mantra of “When thumbs get split, chicks get lit,” that builds and builds in a barbaric mess of synth splendour. It’s good to have them back. Now bend over and take what’s coming to you....

07 Poached Eggs by rubyworks

Fight Like Apes - Something Global

In our instant access, have everything, take everything, capture everything age, going to a gig no longer just involves dancing / standing / sitting at a venue and watching the band. These days the live experience will be digitally documented by its audience and posted up on You Tube before you can say “If a pictures worth a thousand words, what’s a talking picture worth.” The days of venue security searching you for a camera on entry are long gone, with virtually every mobile phone carrying a reasonably decent facility to capture the moment, making such a task impossible and pointless.

So Eoghan Kidney has taken this concept one step further for the video for Fight Like Apes Something Global. Fans were invited to film the band playing a gig on a variety of hand held camera media, the footage was then edited and collated with the results put out for the world to see. Add in suited kabuki men in masks, padded arrows, wedding confetti and the bands unique lyrical style and voila the new Fight Like Apes video is born. The irony is that many of the fans involved in the shoot have also posted their own individual videos up on the net, so You Tube and other video hosts are awash with videos for Something Global. So here it is, as well as a short documentary about the shoot.

Fight Like Apes - Something Global from ξοgΙιαη κιdηεγ on Vimeo.

And this is the making of. Can someone explain the Rocky 3 analogy please ?

The Great Escape @ Brighton - Day 3

The third and final day of The Great Escape in Brighton starts with an Irish music showcase upstairs at The Prince Albert. It’s still very early and many heads in the audience probably warrant Valerie Francis and her comforting warm voice to revive them from the previous nights proceedings. Her songs use unusual instrumentation such as hand bells, trumpet and recorder alongside acoustic guitar to produce a gentle soothing calmness to a short set which is only interrupted by the ringing of a mobile phone of the next artist Iain Archer.

Archer is most probably best known for his work with Snow Patrol, being the co writer of the song Run. But whilst Snow Patrol continue to fill arena sized venues, Archer is playing to a handful of people in a Brighton pub. “Glad to see you’ve left some space for dancing at the front,” he jests at the emptiness. Later he jokes about the mobile phone incident. “This is a mobile free zone - that dick, you know the one.” It seems that every earnest male singer songwriter these days packs themselves off to a cabin or shed in a forest somewhere and is inspired to create poignant music, and Archer has joined that crowd with a new album To The Pine Roots. Explaining that the record was recorded in a cottage in Schwarzland in Germany’s Blackforest he plays a number of songs from it. The Acrobat has a lilting drifting softness and visual captivating words that tell the tale of a gravity defying hero. It sounds a little like an Irish Bright Eyes. Before Frozen Lakes he talks of confused ducks sitting on the frozen water. Archers voice is light and slightly dreamy and his sense of humour makes him an engaging performer.

Angel Pier are the first band of the day and take a traditional approach to chiming melancholic guitar rock. They are hardly original or particularly inspiring, but develop a neat sense of atmosphere with their layered guitar approach which momentarily spirals and soars to higher places. By the end of their set the Prince Albert is packed and a queue leads all the way down the stairs, but nobody is going anywhere because everyone here wants to see Fight Like Apes . There are people craning their necks and standing on chairs to get a view of the band.

We’ve raved regularly about Fight Like Apes, for example here and here and today is no exception. Taking to the stage with false black eyes and cuts on their heads, Fight Like Apes are without doubt the best band from Ireland right now. Bono did you hear that ? Fight Like Apes are like the most pleasurable fistf**k from a stranger you could ever have. With Maykay head slamming like she’s trying to shake her brains out and Pockets seeming to disappear into the ground as he bends ever lower and lower to reach his collapsing microphone stand, the band drill hardcore pop into the crowds ears like the world is about to end. They throw milk crates at each other, Maykay writhes in the crowd and despite technical problems with one of the synths they create a glorious energetic violent performance which is offset by their good nature and slightly humorous approach. Any band that can write a lyric such as “No black bits and no cheese, its just plain toast for me, and did you f*ck her, did you stick things up her?” before joyous synths and guitars collide is always going to get our vote.

Next its down to the seafront and Arc for Gold Teeth, who we wrote about just a few days ago. Their charismatic, good looking singer Joe De Costa could certainly make a few girls hearts melt. He even succeeds with that today, particularly on the danceable Everybody and next single Tasty which manages to sound like a hybrid nutty boy cousin of Madness in the verse and early Blur in the chorus. A couple of songs remind us a little of Hard Fi which is not so good, but these are early days for the band.

Then there is just one band left to see. That band is Yes Giantess (pictured), a band that we first tipped as a One To Watch last December and have been getting continually pumped up about ever since. First a more low key gig at Arc, their first ever in the UK, followed by a late nighter at the Neon Gold records party at Ocean Rooms; both sets deliver - big time. Jan Rosenfeld and his cohorts whack down layers of star bound synths that groove like a vodka fuelled space ship. With heads bobbing in unison and high handclapping a plenty this band have beats thrusting out of them like a sex starved disco queen. Tuff N Stuff is the tune of the event. No question. But it’s not their only song that we get all over excited about. When The Sun Gets Low is equally good. Here Yes Giantess bring to Great Escape heavy clubbed up beats and spunky eighties hallucinatory keyboard riffs that would get even a corpse up dancing. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again - Love it love it love it.

Fight Like Apes @ London Camden Koko

The last time Breaking More Waves came across Fight Like Apes they were performing to a virtually empty basement club in Brighton. Tonight as the screen that hides the stage from the auditorium slowly rises, the band walk out to see a rammed and intoxicated Camden Koko. The volume of punters flushed with excitement has little to do with the bands presence however, and more to do with the fact that this is Friday night, it’s Club NME, it’s gone midnight and extravagant self indulgence of an alcoholic kind has proceeded this moment.

Fight Like Apes are ready to storm it though. The bands frenzied, quirky, occasionally disturbing bombardment of synth and bass combined with the strident vocal of hair tossing MayKay suits a night like this. One moment they are ramming out a volatile cover of Lightsabre Cock Sucking Blues by Mclusky, with its lyrics of “Nicotine stained on account of her crutch, and I’m aching from fucking too much.” The next MayKay is ascending the speaker stack and playing with the hair of girls in the front row. This is a band who want to sonically and visually grab you by the tits and balls, and possibly yank them off. They even ask the crowd to boo for them, which everyone is happy to do. Bass player Tom salutes the masses, this is a two way satisfaction.

The gig climaxes with Lend Me Your Face, probably the quickest speed fuck the audience have ever had, before Battlestations explodes in a screaming orgy of samples and electronica, the band throwing their keyboards to the floor. The audience have been taken, indie cool lost in a smiling mosh pit at the front. Whether the next morning anyone will remember this hardcore unrelenting aural gang bang may well depend upon the extent of the hangover, but no doubt Fight Like Apes satisfied in a bruising and wonderful way.

Fight Like Apes - Tie Me Up With Jackets

On 19th January Fight Like Apes release their new single Tie Me Up With Jackets on Model Citizen. It will be available on a limited edition 7” heavyweight shocking pink vinyl and digital download. Here at Breaking More Waves we’ve become quite obsessed with Fight Like Apes, and mentally debated for hours if they should feature in our One's to Watch List 2009 before finally discarding them on the basis that they were probably just a little too leftfield to gather wider public acclaim in the UK, despite having had some success in Ireland.

Tie Me Up With Jackets shows that Fight Like Apes have no desire to relinquish their status as the most unpredictable, primitive and comically aggressive band to come out of Ireland ever. The song sees MayKay proclaiming that she likes her meatballs in a dish, but she’d also love to see you in the nude with overcoats tied around your head and Japanese children in your bed. She then moves on to a request for her room to be fumigated as it smells like socks and tastes like apple schnapps. This all happens whilst synths and guitars do battle in a nursery rhyme fight, where the children have all been fed drugs and tied up their nannies. Tie Me Up With Jackets is the sound of a two year olds first tantrum, ending with a shouting cacophony of lovely noise. It is utterly brilliant in its madness.

At the time of publishing, there is no official video, so instead watch Pockets from the band make pancakes with Steve Lamacq below ! Yes it’s Fight Like Crepes ! You can buy the single here.

Fight Like Apes @ Brighton Audio

There’s a whole choice of gigs in Brighton tonight, from Ryan Adams, Peggy Sue, Chairlift to The Airborne Toxic Event. However Breaking More Waves decides on one of our current favourites, hardcore synth mentalists Fight Like Apes at Audio, the only gig venue we know of that has a fish tank in the toilets. Unfortunately it seems that either this global armageddon of a recession is kicking in, people have chosen other gigs or simply that Fight Like Apes are not proving popular, as there are only about forty people at the venue.

After encouraging people to come to the front, the lack of punters doesn’t stop the band producing the most brutal primal assault on the ears, combined with a deep dark sense of humour, the end result of which is a deliciously leftfield pop thrill. Musically this is a set from the Irish underground that is deliciously out there, aggressive, but still fun and with enough inventiveness to rupture a few spleens.

The band are an intriguing visual prospect, with gothic looking lead singer MayKay, comical but scary keyboard player Pockets with his flashing light goggle glasses, a big haired bass player who is not afraid to wear both a headband and sweatband, and a drummer who looks like he would be better off in a punk rock band. During their set the band will get the audience to waltz to I’m Beginning To Think You Prefer Beverly Hills 90210 To Me, MayKay and Pockets will jump off stage to bash plastic milk crates against the stage barrier for extra percussion, and during Jake Summers Maykay will wander through the crowd before falling to the floor to sing “Hey baby you were the bedroom king, Well I'm so sorry for breaking your ding-a-ling-a-ling.” Obviously not a woman to be messed with boys.

Fight Like Apes whole show is perversely wrong, and all the better for it. I suspect they would be great fun to go out with for a night, but they would end up chaining you to a lamp post, stripping you naked and ramming a hot poker up your backside. And as wrong as that is, it would seem like a lot of fun. This after all is a band who are happy to sing “Did you fuck her, and did you stick things up her?” whilst aggressive synths create a wall of electro noise; it seems both natural, funny and horrendously right for Fight Like Apes.

The band finish with Battlestations, MayKay screaming into the microphone and jumping up and down on the spot like someone with a mental illness whilst Pockets tips over his keyboard before leaving the stage. Looking round the venue it would be easy to expect to see bodies strewn across the floor, guts hanging out, ear drums exploded, with vomit strewn across their bodies. If there was such a sight then there is no doubt that the bodies would have had a smile on their face. Luckily Fight Like Apes sound didn’t quite reach that a level of brutality, but the smiles were there. There was no need for an encore.

Fight Like Apes - Fight Like Apes And The Mystery Of The Golden Medallion

When I wrote in my previous blog that Fight Like Apes were “like a pumped up fist f*ck against the wall of a pub, under CCTV cameras with your mum and dad watching from the other side of the street,” the band messaged me on my Myspace to tell me that it was the best thing that anyone had ever written about them, and then linked the piece from their website.

Well, I can now repay the compliment by saying that Fight Like Apes have just released an album entitled Fight Like Apes And The Mystery Of The Golden Medallion which is one most inventive and funny aural assaults of the year. A bombardment of synths, guitars and strident yelping vocals, with a polished production by John Goodmanson it just manages to stay on the right side of accessible. The record is currently only on release in Ireland, but thanks to those good people at Recordstore you can get it now before its UK release next year.

Since the previous blog, it has been a busy few months for the band, with festivals, support slots with The Ting Tings, their own tour under the Levi’s One To Watch banner and forthcoming support slots with The Prodigy, where the band are bound to gain some new friends with their uncompromising, chaotic electronic punk sound.

The beauty of Fight Like Apes album is that although their music is sometimes abrasive they match it with a delicious sense of dark fun. Lead singer MayKay may shriek and spit “Shit, shit, shit, shit, bang, bang,” as the chorus to Do You Karate, but elsewhere you can find her singing about how she likes plain toast with no cheese to an electronic backing track that sounds like a Woolworth’s Christmas TV advert with thrashy guitars played by drunk ramapaging 6 year olds. The album may have song titles like Digifucker and Snore Bore Whore and one ’song’ Megameanie may follow Napalm Death’s lead and last a sum total of 5 seconds, but it is all done with a warped smile. After a sample from the ‘so bad its good’ horror flick Plan 9 from Outer Space tells of an attack on a town by aliens during Battlestations, MayKay screams angrily that “The sample sounds like shit and I don’t want to hear it again.” It’s this kind of depreciating humour that gets my vote.

Fight Like Apes are not a band you would make love to. They are not even a band you would have a drunken shag to. Fight Like Apes are a band that you would have a wild abandoned f*ck to. On a bed of nails. And afterwards you may be sore, but hell, you’d have a big smile on your face.

See you down the front for one of their gigs soon. Here's the video to Jake Summers which sums up the band perfectly, with its mix of humour, aggression and warped pop.

Fight Like Apes - New Waves @ Breaking More Waves

Fight Like Apes

Every now and then a song smashes itself so hard into your ears with an energetic spit, crackle and fire that it just demands to be noticed. Lend Me Your Face, the new single by Dublin four piece Fight Like Apes is exactly that. Its fractured blend of aggressive Karen O style screaming vocal, hammering bass and synth almost achieves what the band set out to do when they formed in 2006; to scare audiences with poppy songs played so obnoxiously that everyone leaves. Except in this case the exit doors will remain shut. This song is like a violent shag on broken glass, where the cuts are all part of the pleasure.

This is a band that are not afraid to be confrontational. They have covered McCluskys Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues, a raw and dirty song about nicotine stained crotches, aching from f*cking too much and which asks “Are you coming?” in its chorus. And I guess they don’t mean coming down the shops. This is a guilty pleasure far removed from the concept of Van Halen's Jump or Chesney Hawke's One And Only. This is like a pumped up fist f*ck against the wall of a pub, under CCTV cameras with your mum and dad watching from the other side of the street.

Fight Like Apes first release was in Ireland with an EP in 2007 on independent label Fifa Records. Entitled How Am I Supposed To Kill You If You Have All The Guns it featured the song Jake Summers which has the fantastic lyric “You’re like Kentucky Fried Chicken but without the taste,” and was picked up by Fierce Panda offshoot Cool For Cats for a UK 7 inch single release. This was followed by the David Carradine Is A Bounty Hunter Whose Robotic Arm Hates Your Crotch EP at the end of 2007.

The band, who consist of raven haired MayKay on vocals, Pockets on keyboards, Tom on bass and Adrian on drums have subsequently played SXSW this year and are recording an album with producer John Goodmason (Sleater Kinney and Los Campesinos). They are busy touring the UK right now and are playing a number of Festivals. Lend Me Your Face is released on 7 inch in the UK next week and is available on I Tunes now.

Quirky, exciting, powerful and aggressive Fight Like Apes demand your attention. If you don’t give it, I reckon they’ll come and cut your face for you.

http://www.myspace.com/fightlikeapesmusic