Ok. I’m going to make one thing perfectly clear. If you like pop music, music that’s easy to listen to or understand then steer way clear of DanDanDan. If you like clever noise-pop, distorted, crunching guitars that eat your and your kids as an appetiser before streaking naked down Leith Walk making love to every redirected bus on the way, then this is your new favourite band.
Welcome to the world that is DanDanDan.
Not named because three of them are called Dan (in fact, none of them are called Dan), they strive to make amps bleed. It’s not heavy metal or anything of the sort. It’s fuzzy, crunching and challenging. Music that music wasn’t invented for. Occasionally they go down a Young Knives on steroids route (as in the beginning minute of Guttersniper), occasionally they straddle the tricky balances of new wave on Match of the Day Background Music and occasionally they decide to let a full blown nuclear assault of noise rip your ears to itty bitty pieces (as in during the thankfully short 'Two Birds').
Naturally though, apart from some horrendous mixing during the first and final tracks where the vocals are completely overtaken by the tune and are thus impossible to hear, this is a proper warts-n-all, low budget, keep-it-real collection of music that the creators are clearly huge fans of. It’s not music for the people. It’s not music destined for huge sales. It’s music designed for daring those who buy it to open their ears to something new.
Occasionally though, DanDanDan are liars. “Everything is fine. Everything is dandy” gets repeated during 'Everything is Peachy', a track written to show up those whose lives are just perfect in every way, blind to the social and economic problems this world can face. Yup, as well as everything else, they even try their hand at punk. Is there anything this band can’t do?
Rap, probably.
Of course, this whole thing is beautifully tongue in cheek. The song titles alone should allure you to that notion. It’s not serious, although they’re not exactly joking either. Any EP with a track entitled 'The Sexual Freedom of Cats' should be purchased just for curiosities sake. Joyful, playful la-la-las pepper the occasionally epic but usually mad 'Santuary' before the whole mess crashes back to earth with 'None of this Happiness Gubbins: Part Two', which stomps slowly and forcefully through yet more destruction and droning to the EPs sudden conclusion.
My first thought when this audio-sensory nightmare came to an end was “So did I enjoy that?” and the answer to that question was delayed by having to think about it. Not because it was bad, because it’s actually very good, but it’s not there to be “enjoyed”. It’s there to elicit a whole different type of feeling. It’s mesmerising. It’s the musical equivalent of trying to catch a rock from the top of a 20-story building. No-one knows why you’re there to catch it, but if you don’t it’ll seriously hurt someone.
Well done DanDanDan. This is unlike anything I’m likely to hear this year, and in a music scene where most guitar-based bands all sound like either The Script, The Wombats or My Chemical Romance, to dare to be different and peak curiousity from someone like me is a true achievement.
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