Fuel Bar Café; vendor of animal, vegetable and musical philanthropy, and Withington’s answer to several questions that are yet to be asked, is twenty-two bus stops from Manchester city centre. That’s twenty-one more than most would ever bother to venture of a Friday night.
People are lazy, yes, but people who extol the virtues of expanding horizons are similarly awful. Then consider this not a sermon on the value of cultural exploration – or something equally tedious – but a humble appreciation of 142 bus route. An appreciation of all that it offers in the vein of constructive time-wastery, beyond the permeation of the oft-dictatorial Oldham Street mentality. In particular, it’s an appreciation the first of the Curations creations; an offering of the utmost benevolence from our omniscient masters, Manchester Scenewipe and Weird Era.
In their first act of omnipotence, the powers that be have been stripped Temple Songs down to their constituent parts. Jolan of ‘Jolan from Temple Songs’ fame has been nominated to represent his usual comrades. This could be an executive decision based Darwinian natural selection, or it might just be a matter of logistics; I’m lead to believe that real people, even band member types, have day jobs and such. They shouldn’t though, not when this sort languid, entropic pop exists. These songs defy getting up in
the morning and putting the bins out because it’s never, ever, going to sound as good as their lucent soma coma.i It’s a narcotic blur of almost-but-not-quite-bliss, a Summer of Discontent.
Once lulled into a false sense of obscurity, Mistoa Poltsa are now in the business of robbing you of your dignity and your freedom from Tinnitus. They are loud, tonitruously so, and if you happen to find yourself dancing to their turbulent hooliganry due to forces beyond of your comprehension, then we will be the last to judge. They, like your limbs, are everywhere at once, edges are indeterminable, noises have no definite place, and there’s definitely potential for a quantum physics analogy that I won’t test your patience by making. Also, they reference God and blood and stuff, which I hear is quite hip these days, much like it was in 1,500 B.C. and 1644 A.D.
Then there’s Weird Era, the apogee of Curations’ orbit. They are a band that – despite ones hardest efforts – trigger the spouting of crap, barely-relevant anecdotes, improbable situations, feeble defences of both, and a load of other stuff they would teach you not to do at that mythical Journo School. Look:
1. I once sought to lazily poeticise Weird Era by taking some choice quotes from more deft music observers and utilising the creative potential of Google Translate. They were translated and retranslated over a few international borders and through time zones, then back again to Her Majesty’s finest tongue. The globe’s verdict was that they “dream big pop-up on the semi-independent” and have “rough, melodious echoes of a waterfall”. I can’t promise that this is going to be any more articulate or insightful. This is not a criticism. If anything, provoking this level of crippling incoherence is a good thing. Yeah, I think we can run with this.
2. Reception of the Weird Era experience is best recounted through a medium intimately familiar to those of a melodramatic disposition, with symptoms of narcissism, and those who watch too much daytime television; the fictitious news report.
Imagine, if you will, that Nina Warhurst from North West Tonight has been sent to gather vox pops for a montage on the post-Weird Eraii verdict. There would more than likely be a few of the usual enthusiastic adjectives, even a prosaic idiom or two. The overarching consensus though, however semantically grating, would be that “they killed it”. What “it” could be is not as universally accepted. Their neighbours’ treasured houseplant, a small domestic animal or the concept of inertia are all potential victims of Weird Era’s hypothetical homicide. Back in the studio, Annabel Tiffin would solemnly pass on her condolences. “The family have been informed,” she would say.
We apologise for that tangential disruption to your scheduled reading, and promise to make more sense in the future.
Truth is resumed with the news that Weird Era dabble in the realms of the complex and the reckless. Complex, because their music has the sort of calculated brilliance that makes grown men shout arbitrary words at the Internet. (Also because they probably have an undiagnosed Obsessional Complex). Reckless, because they chuck their audible disorder in the direction of their adoring subjects at a guilt-inducing rate. What did you do yesterday? Weird Era recorded six impossible albums before breakfast. It seems they possess the ability to produce songs by mitosis, or the process of Bokanovskification. iii The resulting specimens are smog-ridden cacophonies of disorientation. Without sliding down the slippery slope of spouting rubbish, it’s fair to say Weird Era sound like what you’re thinking about when you don’t think you’re thinking about anything.
I was going to conclude in a cyclic fashion with a clumsily romanticised reference to the drunkard reciting Mike Garry poetry (‘God is a Manc’ and similar self-glorifying Lad Laureate bullshit) all twenty-two stops home, but I’ll put you out of your misery. God bless Curations and all that sail in her.
i Christ, please read a book and we can pretend this didn’t happen.
ii Yes, post-Weird Era is a recognized historical period. You can find it in all good history books after the Chapters on World War II.
iii Please refer to endnote i.
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