Giddy Motors - Make It Pop
(Fat Cat)
Giddy Motors have a silly name and are from England. They named their record Make It Pop and are on the same label as Sigur Ros. All this might make one assume that Giddy Motors are somehow a bunch of ponces or perhaps play ska music. Woe unto those who make such an error in judgment, for Giddy Motors will crush them beneath their big amps.
Still some others have lumped Giddy Motors in with the current spate of art-funk retreads. Though it is certainly true that the razor sharp guitar slash of Giddy Motors has roots in Gang of Four, an association with skinny Brooklynites playing synths is also likely to result in injury. For the path to Giddy Motors lies not on the dance floor, but via the Texas-Chicago conduit of Big Black and the Jesus Lizard (in fact, Make It Pop was even recorded in Chicago by You Know Who).
Unlike the contemporaries noted above, Giddy Motors are not given to calculated cool or ethereal anything. If they must be associated with anyone, I might pair them up with McLusky, as they seem to share the same love of pushing the freak-out right to the edge. But where McLusky is pure rawk, Giddy Motors are working an angle that is decidedly more angular. That is, they can be as tricky as they are heavy.
On their hardest rocking tunes, such as "Magmanic" the band rips into the music with the spaz level set to "balls out," yet beneath the riffage is a rhythmic complexity that recalls the Jesus Lizard's more adventurous songs: after you recover from the onslaught you realize there is a strict, rewarding structure to the bludgeoning that works wholly in service of the song, and never just to draw attention to itself. Others, such as "Bottle Opener," play with space a bit more, leaving room to breathe in the rhythm section only to choke it off with the offset vocals and other bits of noise dropped into the mix. The claustrophobia and unpredictability recall the sense of dub danger generated by the Pop Group. Then there is stuff like "Sassy," which is just three minutes of riff-heavy rock.
Instead of sitting around waiting for that new Rapture album, go get Make It Pop and hear the groove taken to new ground, not just remixed.
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