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Ruthless Imagery |
Fate can be a real joker sometimes, how could have the good American wife
and mother born in the Iowa in the late 19th century imagined that so many
punk and metal bands would be named after her? Mrs
Enola Gay Tibbets never listened to any kind of punk and metal
anyway, she passed away peacefully in Florida in 1966 and I guess that she
would not have been very fond of studs and leather anyway (but who knows
after all?). The poor lady didn't really make anything to deserve this
posthumous fame to be honest. No the one who should be warmly thanked is
his son, Paul, a good mother-loving man who served in the US Air Force
during WWII and, never missing an opportunity to express all his love for
his dear mom, gave her name to the beautiful
Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber he was in charge
of.
And then life went on, you know how it is, you fly here and there, bomb a
little bit here and there and then, one day of August 1945, you find
yourself dropping a "little boy" on top of a city called Hiroshima and
killing 129 000 people.
Consequence: Paul's mother becomes some kind of rock'n roll star 30 years
later among gangs of young glue sniffers all over the world.
Yes life's a real joker sometimes...
Anyway, today I'm not going to write about the
Danish hardcore punk band,
the terrible 90s metal band,
the 90s French grindcore band,
the 80s German anarcho-punk band,
the early swedish punk band
or any of the others bearing the poor lady's name... no today I'm going to
write a few words about the Enola Gay from Belfast, UK.
This young band plays an interesting mix of noise-rock and modern
post-punk with "venomous hip-hop-inspired vocals" as they describe it so well themselves.
You read noise-rock and hip-hop-inspired vocals you could immediatly think
of some 90s bands like Rage Against The Machine or
Cypress Hill during the golden age of "fusion rock" as we used to
say in France, or rap rock for the others, a genre that will later lead to
the embarrassing Neo-metal era and so on... but you could also think of
more recent acts, the crazy hardcore-punk-infused rap bands
Ho99o9,
Death Grips,
B L A C K I E
or, and of course,
Run The Jewels... but no... you would not be there.
This Enola Gay is loud and noisy (the buzzsaw guitar sound?) but
with clear and heady basslines on top of which comes this (slightly)
hip-hop-inspired vocals that also got something cold and sad in the back
of throat which takes us to post-punk territory. Add a few discreet
electronic sounds and you're not far from the fours tracks of their
Gransha EP. Catchy, cold and heady at the same time? Bloody
brilliant for sure!
Enola Gay is the kind of British/Irish band which seems to be
sailing on the edge of the DIY world, somewhere between
Heavy Lungs,
Girls in Synthesis,
Ditz
and, of course, the Irish sensation
Girl Band... somewhere where the influences (from noise-rock to post-punk through
hip hop and a shitload of British punk and indie bands) mix in something
that already doesn't fit any more in the very tight "music genre boxes"
that the DIY world is generally made of. And that's a good thing.
That's what makes Enola Gay really interesting in my opinion. It's
a mix of many things I love, a very-well-made mix indeed which gives birth
to something quite new, something quite innovative, something firmly
modern.
I don't get all the lyrics but they also seem to want to be anchored in a
current reality, keeping it simple though, "so that it is challenging but with an impact". And that's always a very
good point.
You and I are going to hear more from Enola Gay very soon, I'm
pretty sure of that... and I'm looking forward to it!
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