Les Cox (Sportifs)
Scheiß Mit Reis (Sea)
Going on first impressions, the debut album from Newcastle’s Les Cox (Sportifs) is a bit like the initial disappointment felt when removing the sleeve from a ready meal. Their name is a weak pun and the album title amounts to a puerile joke that every Standard Grade German student will be well-versed in. However unlike said meals, Les Cox and band are anything but disappointing.
It’s hard to make sense of the music at first. It sounds at first like two separate bands, with Jonathan Richman style vocals set to rumbling blues/rockabilly. It’s markedly ramshackle but by the halfway point it’ll have you hooked, like watching a shelf full of china plates collapse only for them all to land unscathed in a pretty formation on the floor, it’s unexpectedly enjoyable.
Yet opening track ‘Dead Beat Formula’ gives basically no indication of what follows. Unpolished and proud, the band are evidently versatile, seemingly comfortable with straight-forward rocking out (Jesse Burns) and more obscure pop efforts, like on Reduction Strategies, peppered with keyboards that sound like a speech therapy session for the cast of Clangers. They manage this without sounding out of their depth, not easy to do.
There’s more than a few hints that the band don’t really care about being taken seriously (as the admittedly hilarious title track will demonstrate) and perhaps that defying of conventions allows them to be more creative with subject matter, none of that boring relationships and getting drunk stuff that we can all attempt to relate to here. There’s just nothing ordinary about this band, always staying interesting. It helps that they can play a bit too, just listen to the abundance of earth-shattering guitar riffs, wear protective head gear if you want.
Willing to be more adventurous that most, it pays off for Les Cox (Sportifs), this album is undeniably interesting and the songs quickly stick in your brain like an unpleasant image of an under-dressed pensioner. Except you might actually enjoy this.
Euan Wallace
