New Music of the Day – XCIII: ArmageddingItOn – Diagonal People

There are times when I despair at the state of music coming up through the parochial grass roots scenes. There seems to be an app to download or a template to follow for everything from writing to promoting to selling your music, strict instructions as to how everything should be done. The result of this Health and Safety, follow the instructions era of music means that everything is following narrow, well travelled paths in regulation uniforms of skinny jeans and complicated hair, vying for the same blasé, generation X-box approval. Identikit bands bringing little new to the musical feast.

 

And then Diagonal People hove into view and serve me up a very large helping of humble pie. Everything I describe above is everything they are not. Diagonal People are a fascinating bunch of multi-discipline creative, sometimes filmmakers, sometimes writers, on this occasion musicians. In a previous era they would be gathered in a 60’s Greenwich Village coffee house or a 70’s Ladbroke Grove squat, the fact that we find them in 21^st century Swindon is just another unpredictable part of the story.

 

Musically they are also wonderfully multi-genre in their tastes, soul infused rhythms carry skewed indie vibes, squiggly electronica and a pained garage rock vocal that vies with sweet pop choruses for ownership of the song.

 

The video is pure art attack, pretentious even, but pretention is fine if it is knowingly so and this is art for art sake or maybe just a bunch of crazies let loose with the grease paint and dressing up box…either way it matches the mercurial qualities of the song to form a compelling package.

 

So it would seem all is not lost, there is hope and it is coming at you Diagonally!