FUCK THE COOKOO CLOCK.



Kleenex / LiLiPUT are slowly sending me insane.

I found the double CD anthology thingy on Kill Rock Stars in the library the other week.

The sleevenotes say that the band – I guess when they started under the name Kleenex anyway – weren’t any great shakes at speaking English, but sang in it anyway, throwing together stolen phrases and bits and pieces they thought were funny and so on.

The opening song is called ‘Nighttoad’. It goes kinda like;

Give yourself lust, try it again
Give yourself lust, you cannot undo
Give yourself lust, and try it forever
Try it forever, you can’t do it

Nightttoad, nighttoad, you are so big
Nightttoad, nighttoad, you are so sick
Nightttoad, nighttoad, you are everywhere
Nightttoad, nighttoad, you are so black

…and continues with variations on that theme, with a backing vocal chiming in with fairly random bursts of “Nighttoad!”, “Yeah!” and “Oi!”.

Now is this the kind of saucy, amphibian weirdness we want from our Swiss feminist post-punk? No it is not!

Far better to listen to ‘Die Matrosen’, which (as those who know it from the Rough Trade Shops Post-Punk compilation can attest) features the best use of whistling in popular music this side of Ronnie Ronalde, ‘HitchHike’, which is just plain ace, 'Igel', which has an over-excited Clanger on backing vox, or most of the other songs, which sound like the Slits if they were prison guards in a collapsing communist regime.

Now there’s a thought…