Review: Brainlove Records' 'Fear of a Wack Planet' (V/A)

You've got to hand it to John Brainlove, the man steering the Brainlove Records ship. He really doesn't play by the New Rules of the Music Industry... which in essence, means that he signs bands that he likes and finds interesting, whether they knit together to make a cohesive sound or image... or not.

Look at all indie labels. They all tread one path and some do it well. Dirty Water Records deal in garage punk and skuzz, Twisted Nerve make folk and noodly experiments in the sheds of South Manchester. Brainlove Records cannot be pigeonholed so easily, as Fear of a Wack Planet shows.

Ignore the Nathan Barley flyer cover and bad pun title... there's something very curious to be found here. Like a drunk, staggering around a record shop and knocking all the stands over, this comps chucks all the bands in the same pot. Some come out as intended, others picking up bits of other records and sounding either confusing or at the very least, original.

For example, Napoleon IIIrd's 'Your God' is a crunchy twangy thing that sounds like it could do with a decent nights sleep. It's rather charming, truth be told. Stairs To Korea and their 'Boy Bear It In Mind' sound like they could've been signed to Postcard Records and would invariably make Stuart Maconie dribble man-goo down his slacks if he heard it.

Elsewhere, Kippi Kaninus makes a discordant bip-folker with 'Sygyt With Me', which mixes Warp at its most gentle with cinematic pianner and moaning harmonics.

However, it's not all easy to understand. There's a lot of 8bit circuit crunching going on, which in the case of Pagan Wanderer Lu's 'Nintendo Folk', sounds kinda cute... yet, in gwEm's 'Ancient Art of Chiptune', it's pretty annoying. A lot of this mock computer gamery is the sound of Rick Wakeman if he didn't have all the gear he'd amassed since his days in Yes. That's not a good thing. Kid Carpet features also and he's still plying the same tired joke of getting lost in the toy section of Tesco.

A good chunk of the comp is dedicated to people with cock-er-ney accents making tweepop/pencilcaserap, which personally, grates more than someone pulling my nose and poking me in the ribs. Laura Wolf's 'Love Was Dead', Ace Bushy Striptease's 'Post Hummus' and Fidel Willeneuve's 'Two Of The Beatles Have Died' are prime examples.

Yet, away from that, there's also The White Noise set. Braindead Collective make the sound of the four horsemen jamming in a free jazz club, only to be chased out of the venue by a hoard of men with drum kits stuck down their socks.

As much as I dislike much of what is contained on the compilation, it's incredibly difficult to get angry at it. I mean, what we've got here is the sound of someone's flights of fancy, all packaged up and offered with a firm belief that the whole thing is at least interesting. And it is interesting. It's almost unclassifiable... testament to the fact that I had to invent a load of genres like 'pencilcaserap' to even get close to conveying what the hell some of the tracks sounded like.

Should you buy it? I've got no idea. I can't make head or tail of it. [Mof]