MySpace Trawl – Modernaire

Remember when you were young and your grandparents often dragged you away to show you something that you weren’t meant to see?

You know, like introducing you to a can of lager in the dusty shed and encouraging you to knock it back? Though sometimes they did just bore you to death about something they thought you’d be interested in.

What we’re poorly trying to get at is that some things are best discovered by other people. This is what happened to us with Modernaire. When we battled our way through the trendy crowd at a Tings Tings gig, they were the first band on. Support bands are either going to send people to the bar or keep you watching. Thankfully this lot kept our attention.

The easiest way to label Modernaire like an HMV shop monkey would be to describe them as electro. That seems to be the newest hip genre that all club nights seem to be morphing into. But there is more to this group then just a siren-sounding synth that has its pitch tweaked to try and make the listener believe it’s a bit more technical.

Chopping up bits of techno and even hits of post-gabba when we saw them, the live show wasn’t just some hunched up laptop stop-start action. With the inclusion of some vocalists who do contribute to the few EPs Modernaire have out, its not a case of one man rocking the show and failing. They also seemed a bit bonkers when we spoke to them afterwards - not only was our copy of Velvet Never Dries EP signed, it was complete with an improvised story. Which we read every night before bed.

With sounds slowly changing and sliding, there is some brilliant production work going on. They haven’t gone “here’s a good bassline, let’s repeat it for seven minutes” - instead Modernaire have worked around various sounds and edited them, re-edited them and worked in sounds that only seem to appear for a few seconds. Even if one guitar lick appears once or twice, its use is always effective.

None of these happy overkill lovely lyrics appear either. They’re not intense, but you do get the feeling that some meaning is attached to them but not in the context where we’re encouraged to cuddle the nearest stranger if they happen to be wearing a green t-shirt.

We could easily describe them as ‘nu-rave electro fighting pirates surfing on a punky funk edge’. But then that sounds really bad and like something that someone would use to describe them after hearing them for a minute on a bad sound system.

Thank the lord it’s not reproduced Euro dance. With vibrant exciting acts such as Modernaire around, we hope they get a break sooner rather then later. One play on daytime radio will have people reeled in.

For more:

Modernaire MySpace