Bewildering debut from inimitable Oxford five-piece
So here’s the rub: debut album; singing drummer who is actually a guitarist but plays drums to “make things deliberately uncomfortable”; fifteen songs spanning just under thirty-eight minutes. Obviously some sort of punk bent, then. Well, yes. And no. The Mules are a confusing proposition, certainly, and their first full-length Save Your Face is a baffling musical pick n’ mix grab bag. It’s not punk, it’s not skiffle, it’s not country and it’s not jazz – but at times it’s all four, and as it twists and turns its way into your consciousness, this schizoid rattle-trap of a record excites and frustrates in equal measure.
Opener Polly O is what you might expect, perhaps – a Fugazi-style salvo of tumbling drums, taut riffs and shouty vocals that’s all over in less than three minutes. Things change tack immediately with the title track, which clocks in at just over a minute and a half and sounds like a drunken skiffle band playing to an audience of three at your local pub. Or someone falling through a drum kit into a piano. Things continue in this skittish fashion throughout the album as it flits from genre to genre, referencing everyone from Bob Dylan to Gang of Four.
It’s interesting, but not necessarily easy listening – though the musicians themselves seem happy to acknowledge this. Bassist James Leslie, who also runs the Organ Grinder label on which the record is released, says that The Mules’ music “can be quite cold and almost alienating; even as a band member I’d say it’s not a record for all seasons. It’s not a feel-good hit of the summer!” Quite.
Thing is, though, it’s imaginative, breathless, unique – and that lends it a certain sort of unfathomable, unlikely charm. Seasonticketholder is an eccentric blast that opens with balls-out punk and then morphs into a fiddle-led mishmash that sounds like the Levellers on speed; Tule Lake’s rockabilly romp sounds like it was written in Arkansas, not Oxfordshire; Ham Shank is a strident, frenzied ska-punk closer.
It’s a difficult record to categorise, but stylistically – if not musically – Save Your Face bears some resemblance to the Coral’s self-titled debut. It’s similarly distinctive and original and, on the downside, suffers from the same feeling of inconsistency: it doesn’t quite feel coherent enough and that means you really do have to be in the right sort of mood to listen to it.
It’s difficult to imagine how these songs would translate in a live setting, but you get the feeling that a Mules show would be something of a glorious, vaudevillian mess. Their debut is a little hit and miss, perhaps, but infinitely more engaging than the likes of James Blunt/Morrison or anything within 500 feet of Chris Martin; at least The Mules have a bit of zip about them, and an unwillingness to compromise or cowtow to musical trends. And they get bonus points for not taking themselves too seriously: “We do hope our music is fun”, says singer-drummer Ed Seed. On balance, it probably is.
By Beck Kingsnorth, August 2006. www.twistedear.com |
