This weekend I’ll mostly be listening to… Regular Fries

My tolerance, as I’ve mentioned before, for contemporary indie is low. Very low indeed. Particularly since the early 1990s. Probably because I went back to metal and over to electronica and on to future pop and EBM and really, that which was left in between seemed to lack a certain energy or maybe I lacked the energy to go searching. And the bits of indie that I have liked subsequently have tended to be either the old stalwarts like Primal Scream (sometimes), the louder more guitar based stuff like Mansun or odds and ends like…er…ahem…Embrace (It can’t be the vocals, but there’s something in their dogged determination to keep going…).

Anyhow, one band I loved at the time, and still do, were the Regular Fries. Seven members, At least one of whom was a music journalist… generally never a good sign. Zonked out rhythms… loping melodies, mumbled vocals usually saying something that sounds very slightly meaningful but isn’t, samples. And here’s the thing, I’m usually not that taken by this sort of thing, particularly the whole stoned sub culture… of which they were an almost gleeful part with their own brand of ‘skunk-rock’. They like smoking, fine, we get it. We just don’t need to be told again and again about the joys of it. But that said they just reminded me in some way of the early 1990s. Some sort of amalgam of the Happy Mondays and Black Grape. Sure. These guys knew their limitations. Perhaps. And speaking of that they could, admittedly, be just a little bit boring here and there, but… I always liked the half-spoken vocals, the meditative pace… just mooching along, nothing to see here… steady as she goes.

I wonder is it that there was an awful lot going on in their tracks? It wasn’t just the instruments but snippets of samples, found sounds and so on. And in that way I think they were more similar to bands from a decade or even two earlier, particularly those in post-punk who layered their sound.

This bunch of songs here are taken from their first album “Accept the Signal”. There’s a fantastic track off their second album called Africa Take Me Back, which sadly isn’t on YouTube, and all their stuff appears to be deleted and mostly unavailable through – shall we call them – alternative channels. Later there were linkups with both Primal Scream and Mercury Rev. I haven’t heard them yet.

As noted on wiki:

On their split in March 2001 songwriter Paul Moody announced “We hate the charts and the charts hate us. We’re off into the cosmos!”.

For a band with their ethos that sort of makes sense.

King Kong

The Girls

Wires

Dream Lottery

The Pink Room

Swimming in Someone Else’s Pool.

Supposed to be a Gas