CLECKHUDDERSFAX have Yorkshire roots, Lebanese ancestry and London credentials. They are a key part of Hackney’s Dalston Lane house party scene and in recent months they have developed a rather beguiling sound. They have added a dance-provoking sheenof devilishly cunning keyboard riffs and bouncing tempos to surround their basically noisy, crunchy musical core. The result is highly original and very engaging. This album is a very good reflection of the live set that has been making their serious alt-audiences guiltily happy wherever they went this summer and autumn.
Computer games, heavy metal dumbness, electronically spun vocals and swatches of middle eastern melody are randomly mixed and splurged out, like the psychotropic cover art that represents the content so well. The sound is spicy, perfumed, lurching and head jerking by turns. The songs are artfully constructed and agreeably varied with plenty of well-placed hooks. If ginger isn’t your favourite – well they’ve also got cardamom, caraway seed or raspberry fizzing up in a few bars time. 6Music would be playing it all day long if they knew about it. Even Radio One might consider a rebellious spin or two.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s vocals are as much an instrument as a text decoding system. Live, he processes the microphone signal at source, with a large gizmo slung over his shoulder and splendid noises issuing like Papal Smoke. On the CD the actual words get a bit lost in the fun, but the sound itself adds a lot to the general sense of wilfully confused involvement in (it has to be said) real art. The Cleckhuddersfax Triangle is, after all, a suitably enigmatic location from which to launch an aesthetic assault on cosmopolitan party goers.
The one song that does stand out as being “about” something specific (and serious) is “North Tripoli”. Lawrence has said that it was written as a response to the events that surrounded the destruction and reconstruction of the Nahr el Bared refugee camp located north of the city of Tripoli in Lebanon. Amidst its disco-crazy riffs and a chorus of “On the beat/North Tripoli”, attention to the words will reveal refugees, bones, crushed houses and shoes from nameless feet. The subversive mind here is hiding very carefully, but its outward gaze is pretty sharp.
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“Steller's Sea Cow” is another highlight. It lurches along like some 70s glam rock gone sweetly wrong. “A Decree” has a monster keyboard riff that comes in after about 2 minutes – lifting the album into dance floor mayhem at 2:22 and provoking more fun than magic beans. Keeby’s bass gets to dive around like Goofy on ice. The last section of vocal goes into planetary orbit like a 1950s sci-fi film. Last track “National Anthem Of Cleckhuddersfax” is an instrumental that could not safely be played at the 2010 Olympics, Dalston regeneration or no. There seem to be plenty of mental and inventive instruments, chasing away a cheeky Isaac Hayes reference in the first moments. After that is a metronomic progress that tries hard to stifle its own laughter under the po-faced supervision of some imagined kind of military junta.
I think you will like this. I can imagine one or two lightweights being a tiny bit bamboozled.
http://boomkat.com/downloads/321141-cleckhuddersfax-spen-beck
www.myspace.com/cleckhuddersfax
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