Thursday 3 March 2016

The Birth of The Birth Marks

A Very Bon Friday night in a vegetarian café south of Manchester's sexy student scene was the place where some fortunate fuckers bore witness to the birth of the Birth Marks. The straight life had taken its toll on the rhythm section of garage rock quartet Sex Hands so the ever prolific guitarists Dylan Hughes and Edwin Stevens, who also play in Desmadrados Soldados de Ventura, Irma Vep and Yerba Mansa, hunted down the bass skills of Oliver Costello and drum-diddling of Alex Hewett, more often recognisable as the frontman of slick soul-funk outfit Aldous RH. The Birth Marks are no great departure from Sex Hands, and most of their set was actually songs that would have been Sex Hands songs had half of them not had too much work on their hands. If anything this was an upgrade, simply because their new songs are the better than the old ones. Dylan and Edwin still trade Lou Reed licks like an explosion of plastic inevitability and holler away incomprehensibly. Tonight I thought Edwin was singing about the womble Orinoco, but he probably wasn't. Dylan had a whole lotta pedals but Edwin had just one distortion overdrive gizmo clicking on and off fast and furious. Dylan was the style rebel, forgetting to wear a peaked cap like the other three. Alex's hat bore the logo of the artist generally known as Prince even if he didn't want to be. He screwed up one drum intro, but that didn't matter. Edwin reckoned they'd played the first live fade out ever, but that's probably been done before. Maybe the most fun number was a herky jerky instrumental, a bit like the Velvet Underground's "Guess I'm Falling in Love" but actually a dance for a "CGI Dad."


...more to come...
I need to buy a laptop, OK?


They played "Too Tired" and you can hear it here:
https://soundcloud.com/very-bon/the-birth-marks-too-tired

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