MySpace Trawl – Diamarek
Just when we thought we couldn’t milk this feature any further, we've somehow managed to surprise ourselves. Usually when we browse the internet on cold lonely nights looking for a band to feature, we always find someone good, hence the entire feature, and badly research some stuff about them.
This week, our band in the spotlight is Diamarek who hail from Belgium – the country usually associated with ginger-haired reporter Tintin and the old sea dog himself Captain Haddock. We actually know more about Tintin than Diamarek. After stumbling across their MySpace page, we were intrigued to hear their gentle sounds. More on these later. However, we also left mightily confused when it came to finding out the history of this band…
Because we are English and ignorant twats, we expect everyone to speak the Queen's English – who by the way, you can still send your birthday wishes to. However, Diamarek aren’t like everyone else and opted to write their biography in their native tongue. Not that we have a problem with this. But we are unable to give you any kind of information on the band, which is a little frustrating. So, doing the best we can and with no knowledge of the Belgian language (isn't it a mix of Dutch, French and German or something?), we attempt to translate for everyone’s amusement.
Groupe formé en 2005 par la rencontre de 4 musiciens, Diamarek entre en scène à Liege en mai 2006 et participe au festival de Nandrin. Diamarek se décrit comme un groupe de fusion instrumentale. Après avoir expérimenté les joies de la scène, Diamarek a enregistré sa première démo au studio zero db en Fevrier 2007. Les chansons sont désormais disponibles sur myspace.
Erm… OK then. From the sheer amount of made up and funny words which is making our Microsoft Word spell checker spasm in excitement, we think that the group is made up of four musicians and formed in 2005. Honestly, we don’t speak Belgian. In 2006 they may have played a festival which was quite experimental and have started recording demos which are on MySpace. So far so good we hope/think/worry. Unfortunately, as the cockneys say, it all goes a little Pete Tong after that as we get lost in a blur of foreign talk. From the rest of the blurb, we think they’ve collaborated with someone or plan to. We dunno, we’ve tried our best and definitely deserve an extra biscuit while we watch 11 girls on Big Brother fight over hair straighteners and some gawky-looking bloke.
Even Google doesn’t help us in our quest for knowledge about Diamarek. More shockingly, the source of all knowledge that is Wikipedia also brings up nothing relevant. So this week’s act is a bit of a mystery, all we know are their names and what instruments they play. But does it matter? Of course not, the music industry is often too concerned with image and molding people in to squeaky clean blobs. Still, they didn’t stop us from knowing that Sarah Harding from Girls Aloud used to be a pro Nazi supporter. We have our contacts, even if they are all alcoholic liars.
The music that Diamarek plays can loosely and lazily be compared to another band we like and have featured before, Explosions In The Sky. Diamarek reek of post rock influences but this is a different sound we expected to hear when looking at their influences. Just some of them are Bob Marley and Slash. Sadly no reggae rock track is here, which would be interesting to hear, but sadly hasn’t quite materialised. Yet again, we don’t know the names of the songs as they are in foreign-speak, but we do like them all. Especially Le Mi which is like listening to a hyped-up folk song.
We think all of these tracks are demos and works in progress but, again, this is only an assumption as our translating skills aren’t quite to a professional standard. But whatever they are, we do like them a lot. Think of awesome–yet-miserable post rockers Mogwai. This is what we can only compare them to, but they have a little bit more happiness attached to them. They don’t seem the sort of blokes to go chucking kids off stages at festivals either. Which is always a good thing. For our next first, we want a band that uses multiple key changes throughout their songs. Might take a while.
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