samedi 13 novembre 2021

Enola Gay

 

picture by 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! 
 
 
 
 
 
  You can listen to Enola Gay on Rien à Faire #28.
 
 
 

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