How many bands does it take make a movement? Maybe two is enough, it is certainly enough for a pincer movement so for now let’s consider this less a gathering of the like-minded clans and more a two-pronged attack on complacency. Alongside their fellow West Country art-noise pedlars, Diagonal People, Martyrials raison d’etre seems simple – to rouse the musical proletariat from their somnambulistic stagger. Both bands seem to use music like a Rubik’s cube, spinning the squares into weird random patterns and occasionally finding the answer, but if you are more interested in the answer than the question then their music is not for you.
The colours on Martyrials cube represent punk and industrial dance, electro-clash, krautrock and scuzzy garage creations, they look like they hang out with The Doors, if The Doors had carried on long enough into the seventies to have a bleak, experimental Berlin period and they sing in satirical sound-bites and poke avant-garde sticks at the bear of conformity. If we hadn’t lost track of this sort of revolutionary way of thinking we’d still be defending Guernica from Franco! Or something…
