Worcester Music Festival is a back-to-back sequence of good times and joy, though if I have one regret from this year’s festival, it’s that I only caught the end of the Hurricane Tapes gig at the Oil Basin. Frontman Jonny Rose bashed out Gang of Four-like riffs and messed about with guitar pedals while wearing a Slowdive T-shirt. I had no idea at the time that he also writes under the pandemic-prompted pseudonym Pink Drone. The first Pink Drone album Fluxus was featured on Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone on BBC 6 Music, and Monochromatic is Rose’s fourth album of post-post-punk synth.
Album opener ‘Telepaths’ seems to have repurposed all the parts of Gary Numan’s ‘Cars’ like a Transformers truck being made in the A-Team garage. The second half of the track sounds like mechanics in forklifts trying gamely to fend off a blitz of alien lasers. The maudlin guitar line on ‘Come Back Home’ is a slight echo of Interpol’s ‘The New’, and the drums are minimalist à la coldwave pioneers Guerre Froide. “My heart is like a wasteland…I suffocate in silence,” Rose states as matter-of-factly as Ian Curtis pointing at an especially gruesome detail in a book about Auschwitz. This is a track to listen to on the top deck of a bus to Bromsgrove while it’s dark and freezing, which is exactly what I’m doing as I type this.
If H.G. Wells had predicted the rise of the synths, he might have written ‘Precinct 9’ before Pink Drone did, as you won’t be able to listen to it without imagining Woking town centre under attack by spindly tripod nasties with blood and illegal redevelopment on their tiny evil minds. ‘Metallic’ reminds me of a Russian punk song from circa ’85 I heard a few months ago – more angular than a million hexagons and more agitated than a toddler about to meet the dentist. Something sounds very wrong on ‘Something Is Wrong’. It’s nothing to do with the musicianship (you can be assured that’s consistently sublime) – rather, it conveys the sort of doom you would associate with being in an abandoned factory. Grinding machinery can be heard through imperceptible walls, but it’s nowhere near as loud as your frantic heart. “Something is wrong / Why can’t you see it?”
If Kraftwerk had been asked by the union to make the means of production a little less alienating and a little more fun, ‘Electronic Boogie’ would be the result. The synth appears to collapse towards the end and a merry squall of fuzzed-up guitars takes its place. ‘Separation’ manages to join a Joy Division-like title with a brooding Joy Division-like aural landscape. “Love is a stranger / Getting further away / Separation” – this is one for all the Eurythmics fans and divorcees (possibly exactly the same group of people). Hope is the thing with feathers, and ‘Aeronauts’ is a track that soars.
‘Christian’ is dedicated to the late Christian Burton, who was a big part of the Worcester music scene and regularly helped and promoted Hurricane Tapes. The track can be described as Godspeed You! Black Emperor soundtracking an Andrei Tarkovsky film. Talking of which, the final track, ‘Dark Cinema’, is the equivalent of the sky turning red and trees immediately withering into piles of ash. The bass lumbers on like a T-Rex with a Lego foot-wound, and synths scream like sirens. There is then a brief pause, and, after somewhat more upbeat bass and synth, Rose demands that we “listen to the voice inside.” I am politely demanding that you listen to Monochromatic and the Pink Drone back catalogue. The sound of 1979-1980 is the sound of today: Thatcher has been cloned, the butcher’s apron is the talk of the town, but at least the synths are better. Praise be to the synths.
Monochromatic is out now on Bandcamp
By: Neil Laurenson