6 for ’12:
Humousexual.

Another great band filtering into my consciousness late last year, (partly through the evangelism of Everard Records, partly via a great set I saw them play at Dalston venue Power Lunches), Humousexual are a London/Berlin duo who have seemingly been around for a few years, but, perhaps owing to the inherent problems of being a London/Berlin duo, have yet to make much of an impact on the wider world. This situation is hopefully soon to be rectified to a certain extent by the release of both a 7” EP on the aforementioned Everard, and a self-released mini-album type thing entitled ‘Grenzenlos’. Each copy of the latter is rendered unique thanks to cover art featuring locations torn straight off a collection of vintage postcards – a brilliant design decision that seems to perfectly exemplify the ethos of quality, self-sufficiency and personal connection captured in the band’s music.

‘Grenzenlos’ is seven songs, all loosely themed around travel and places, and all extremely good. Building on an unapologetically rough bedrock of OD channel guitar, stand-up drumming and this-is-my-speaking-voice-what’s-the-problem-w/-that vocals, Humousexual could be said to kinda split the difference between classic pop-punk, Messthetics amateurism and C86 bounce, but really I think their chief characteristic is more that of making music entirely devoid of affectation. A rare occurrence in rock/pop music, not necessarily always a good thing, but in this case, both disarming and… what’s the word..? ‘Refreshing’, maybe? Ugh, no – makes them sound like mouthwash or something, but I can’t think of an alternative right now – you get what I mean.

There’s a Billy Bragg-esque ‘blokes singing songs about stuff that matters to them’ sorta feel to what Humousexual do, but with the earnestness and miscellaneous twattery that blights most such contemporary ‘folk songs for modern times’ singer-songwriter type ventures cannily avoided – partly through keeping the pace fast and the punk grit foregrounded, but mostly just by being funny and elegantly constructed and generous of spirit and righteous of intent and just, well, good, y’know.

It’s hard to express the extent to which I’ve grown to love the songs on this CD over the past couple of months. Playing them all several times over during a long, cold walk down the Old Kent Road in December, I wanted to clutch them to my heart in some weird gesture of brotherhood, to do *something* to try to express my solidarity with these two voices in my headphones, who seem very much to be rising above the confusion and isolation and cultural disintegration of these dark days, cutting the crap and pressing forward (politically/aesthetically/morally/musically) in the RIGHT direction.

Recommended about as strongly as it’s possible to recommend anything, you can listen to and go shopping for both releases here.

Labels: Humousexual, I like