One of the most arresting images of Kubrick’s take on Anthony Bugress’ A Clockwork Orange was that of Alex, bowler tipped forward angled warily over his blackened eye. And the dark glint in that eye that shone with a fearsome ambivalence.
Ugly Side of Love’s what might have happened had Alex been Bristolian, in a band and taken under the wing of Geoff Barrow. He released this album on his Invada label last year, and Barrow’s love affair with everything experimental continues to reap rich rewards. If his esoteric tendencies have transported him into some kind of blissful neuroses where melody’s eked out of it’s corrugated edges (see BEAK>) then Malachai eke it out by peering into it’s history and pulling out bits that seem to fit into their warped tapestry of sound.
Ugly Side Of Love is a bliss-full album. It simmers, kicks, rages and subsides, and rarely sounds like it’s doing anything other than enjoying itself immensely. Even if it’s arch playfulness diverts the album into beguiling superiority form time to time, or the band decide merely to kick and stomp rather than play, you’re always sure the sentiments served with a pinch of salt. It doesn’t flow it fits and starts, Malachai as at ease distorting samples into hazy trip-hop interludes - as in ’Only For You’s’ Wilson-sandbox wet dream - as they are reinterpreting the thrust of 60’s cock rock for a generation as eager to hold controllers as crotches.
A sense of nostalgia imbues itself throughout - opener ‘Warriors’ doesn’t just use name check the ‘79 film, it literally recreates it’s oppressive atmosphere, the band detuning themselves into a wide eyed taunt of “come out and play” - but they rarely let anything sound rehashed. The liners only list two sample sources; Malachai don’t sound like their influences, they merely mould them into their own warped sound. Towards the latter stages of Ugly Side, as the band’s stoned smog threatens to engulf their ideas, ‘Another Sun’, ‘How Long’ and ‘Fading World’ serve up a trio of blowback knee benders. Malachai haven’t done it again, they’ve done it this once, and personally we can’t wait to see what happens next.
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