‘Friday has this grim propensity to be a bit of a dry one: the persistent drip of emails touting largely drab wares in the inbox tends only to be sporadic at best, lunchbreaks more or less double in length, and this week the weather’s still unremittingly dour. Though alleviating the gloom is this lustrous composition from Stockholm five-piece Alexandria, for Whatever is positively sodden with an inspiratory brightness: giddying as Dent May’s wondrously blithe Do Things and gleeful as Melody’s Echo Chamber, it’s gawky as it is graceful. And Friday just perked up a touch as a direct result!’
“I just kinda started asking myself these questions about what pop music’s role is in carrying these mass messages; these unconscious messages of mass destruction. Or mass salvation? It just depended on the song. For one of them, we were looking to channel the ‘Jonestown Massacre by way of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive, and that’s almost this message, you know, of survival. And I was like: ‘Well, if the world were to end this year, I wanna write the Top 10 singles album documenting whatever it was that was the number one hit at that particular time.’ I guess that’s kinda how it turned out.”
Dots & Dashes talk the impending apocalypse, pop, and Paw Tracks with Prince Rama’s Taraka Larson…
‘Just as the retro disco leanings of Do Things signalled a radical deviation from the majestic Hawaii Five-0 vibes of the début, The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele, The See Hear Club stands as a wonderfully quaint alternative to the fads and furores to plague the nocturnal goings-on for they that troll Dalston nightly. Where handstamps are oft scrutinised as to how imitable they may be – pressure, permanent marker or old fashioned ink stamp, etc. – tonight Anika Motthershaw’s endearing doodles are rightly admired. To further differentiate the soirée from your average, and with it commonly anticlimactic venture outdoors May has picked out Brian De Palma’s veritably demented Phantom of the Paradise from his VHS collection to be aired after his quietly glitzy showing. “I hope you’re all trippin’ on acid right now”, he later asserts. “‘Cos it’s really fuckin’ awesome.” Acid, one presumes, is in short supply down the far end of The Gallery Cafe, although the ales on offer are kinda alright. They momentarily make his optical illusion tee do some fairly wild things, at any rate.’
Dots & Dashes review Dent May as he makes tracks back to London…
