That Fucking Tank @ Bar 1-20 (Huddersfield)
By Lauren Strain
Tonight, in drizzly Pennine country with sleep in its bleary eyes and grit on its railtracks, we wander into this cornerhouse bar to find a large number of children onstage barely out of Huggies and totting up, I estimate, a grand total of four and a half years of age between them. The pudgy-jowled frontboy dons a pair of aviators, a Topman beret-meets-teacosy-meets some form of apparently-fashionable hat or other, a delicately ripped t-shirt and the kind of "Ooh, check me out, sticking my middle finger up at you" expression that you can actually buy on the face of one of those Bratz dolls and have implanted onto your own by a plastic surgeon. He's also chewing gum and has a fag, the purpose of which seems not to exist, as it droops within his clutch until he realises that the burning sensation he can feel between his index and middle finger is that of cindering flesh. It's merely another necessary bit of the Rock n' Roll Rulebook for Kids kit. He's probably wearing Converse, too, but I wouldn't know because I can't see for the girl in front who the pintsized keyboard player keeps grimacing at and taking photographs of whilst he should be, I dunno, playing or something. Said frontboy also probably goes home to a bowl of Cheerios and a set of Thomas The Tank Engine pyjamas but, again, I wouldn't know because... well, why would I?
Of course, it's probably a bit wrong of me to bitch oh-so-cynically about a bunch of high school practice room mates trying out their best poses, power chords and Kings of Leon covers in front of their friends; after all, it's rather sweet to see nobbut bairns throwing their clichéd little hearts and innocent souls into causing a bit of tuneless din. Good on them, at least they're doing something vaguely more productive than dissecting frogs on a Sunday in their backyard whilst mum rustles up some burgers and twisty fries. The sad thing is, however, seeing a group of Milkybar tweenager lads forcefully, shamelessly and 100% wittingly model themselves on the more wasted of today's hopeless, pathetic, fall-about-and-then-fall-off-the-bandwagon Rock (sorry, 'Drug' - 'cause it's not like it's about the music anymore, is it?) Stars. So much for young minds being fertile breeding grounds for a wilful creativity, or whatever it is that teachers say these days. Quick, boys! Get yourselves some originality and personality - you're about fourteen years old, for Christ's sake; you're supposed to be untainted, unrestricted, wild! Get your Toni and Guy'd head out of the goddamned NME, form your own goddamned person and be a goddamned decent and truly new next generation. And you know what else? A life expectancy beyond the age of, say, twenty five, is actually kinda cool. Stop being sheep. Your idols are not worth it. WAKE UP.
Moving on, then, from some sort of jaded rant, to talk about Stateless. Now, here is a band who know all about freedom; every move, look, sense, space and feel of it. Opening with 'Prism #1', great pacific-blue swoops of sound thread together with silver-grey lines of piano and skidding, tripping, dancing beats cascade around your body throughout their emotionally-draining set. The deep trenches of 'Whiter Than Snow' wrap their dirtiest rhythms yet in skyscraping snowdrop vocals and a hypnotic, pulsating drive, as though each member of the band wired their hearts to a tape machine, pressed 'record' and doused what came out with drapes of velvet; red, rich and a little on the dark side. 'Frida' lifts us up towards somewhere else and during 'Bluetrace', frontman Chris falls backwards from the microphone into a black pit of growing, furious clamour and attacks the guitar, thrashing his head and body around in a friction of total abandonment whilst Kidkanevil's hands stir up tornadoes of thunderbolts from the decks. This is the feeling you get with Stateless. They're always in flight, mid-suspension, looking down on you from a small height, from somewhere a little hazy, a little dreamy and a little like some clouded blur of a far-off heaven, floating through optical slides of glimpsed, half-formed worlds. There's something very comforting in thinking that their music knows something you don't... at least, not quite yet.
Then along stampede That Fucking Tank, who make the most sane of beings want to screw elephants. However, there are no elephants in the immediate vicinity, so we drink hard liquor and shout at them instead. They bash out the most rapacious, yet somehow very intelligent, caveman noise for the loins you ever will hear on this earth. Grrrrrowl.
