U.K. post-punks Beige Banquet have followed up their debut LP Beta from earlier this year with a self-titled EP. If you liked their earlier release, then this EP is probably going to do it for you as well. The band continue to refine their striking combination of starchy, Devo-esque grooves; obtuse, melodious musings a la The Fall; and dry-but-limber motorik Can rhythms, in order to broadcast a subtle sense of disorder and soft panic—like a public address system that only announces riddles in moments of crisis.
They’re reminiscent of contemporary post-punk revivalists like N0V3L but more melodic and deliberate in their attempts to induce you to dance while they heighten the sense of paranoia in the atmosphere by extracting kernels of alienation from the confines of your cultural experience and igniting them in the air like grey confetti bombs, captured in an art-house favored aspect ratio. Dip into the fog and smoldering forge of dying civic flame that is Beige Banquet’s teeth-rattling, casually distressed alarm, a sound which warns of our arrested state of historical affairs, and worse things to come, as circumstances playout in accordance with the shallow logic and constant need for bloodletting as encapsulated within a social contract that sorts in favor of the cruelty and accumulation of a few, over the conscience and conscious desires of a community.
Buy and stream Beige Banquet below via Bandcamp:
You can also buy the EP on cassette here and 10-inch vinyl here.
