Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion

We’ll start off with another unused Singles Jukebox entry, from a while back:

‘Fight Like Apes - Tie Me Up With Jackets
I'm a bit torn on this one. The acceleration from the burbling opening into the blaring technicolour chorus is thrilling, but the singer's voice is a harder sell and by the end the shouting is just a touch too much. Similarly the zany lyrics repeatedly grate through trying far, far too hard but the Simple Kid reference makes me grin and 'we'll play lovely noise' is just about perfect as a dumb chorus statement. I still approve of anyone taking emo-minus-angst as a starting point and at the very least it makes me want to see what else the band can pull off.
[7]’.

Well, I did, and it turns out rather a lot that is much better! I’d like to say that I just hadn’t heard of Fight Like Apes before that, but sadly in fact I had but on the basis of Irishness and having a primate related name I’d somehow merged them together with Humanzi in my mind and therefore not bothered listening. Oh well, better late than never. Fight Like Apes and the Mystery of the Golden Medallion is actually just about a 2009 album by UK release date at least.

For all that I complained of trying too hard in the lyrics (and the occasional contrived moment does sneak in elsewhere), the album is actually characterised mainly by being blissfully free of self-conciousness that might otherwise have held them back. So they rally their pop sensibilities and day-glo keyboards and head off in noble pursuit of the base and immediate, firmly rooted in Los Campesinos! style indie-pop but continually harder and more direct, and armed with Maykay’s yelp and embittered cursing and whoever it is that also does vocals sounding, to quote another Jukebox contributor, like ‘[a] guy who wanders in from a hardcore band near the end’.

They combine the heady thrills that result from this all out assault that with enough other tricks to ration it over the whole record. “Jake Summers” alternates between gauche and studied cool, its synthetic heartbreak interludes like Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Maps”. “Digifucker" sets itself up as coy and quirky even more convincingly than “Tie Me Up in Jackets” before you realise that it was just a pose to allow the surge into the vein-popping outrage of its chorus (“So did you fuck her??/Did you stick things up her??”) to hit you round the head even harder. They have a thing with plummy voice samples from B-movies too, cutting them up to increasingly amusing and unsettling effect in that song and others.

Best of all is “Do You Karate?”, a whirlwind tour around everything they do best in just over two minutes. Pummelling drums, inventive profanity (‘you’re about as much use as a cuntless whore’) a chorus that collides the two vocalists at full pelt, and an enormous synth hook that lights up the middle of it and serves as another indie reference, following the line ‘he doesn’t even know you like Stars!’ and resembling said band’s “Reunion” turned up to 11.
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