EP One – Glitch Trip, Death Drive (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Some bands fit neatly into little boxes, musical comfort zones, some head off into the fringes and try to create something totally new, with variable success, then there are bands like the wonderfully named Glitch Trip, Death Drive! whose talents seem to lie in picking up all those strange musical off cuts from the workshop floor, who go through the imaginary bins outside metaphorical studios for interesting things to recycle, glue them all together and come back with a musical chimera. You recognise all the parts, it’s just you’ve never seen them assembled quite like this before.

Theirs is a hybrid of pop and indie, garage rock and art-punk. It is noisy yet melodic, brimming with angst but woven with suppleness and subtlety, it flexes and bends when required but also forms a stick to beat the listeners senses into quiet submission. There is room for atmospherics and dreamlike harmonies, dark goth-pop allusions and scuzzy rock illusions, melodic meandering and melancholic musing and each new spin reveals yet another texture. This is certainly music which is far cleverer than the first listen might suggest.

We hear a lot about band’s DIY ethics these days when what they really mean is they haven’t been signed yet and will drop those same ethics the moment the cheque clears, but GTDD (as its friends get to call it) is the real sound of DIY music and the territory that goes with that is one that sees them send physical CD’s and typed letters to reviewers which always speaks volumes in my old school world.