Following our previous explorations in the world of German music, we found that if you pick under the scab of rubbish, naff, cheesy, boring, manufactured stuff, it isn’t all bad. Previous trawls have led us to find some pretty insane stuff to say the least.
Drumcorps combined evil noise and guitars together to keep the metal heads happy and Warren Suicide was edgy cool electro punk, if that makes any sense. Now, it might have made sense to have done this week’s Trawl after the other two, as they're all German bands, and it would have been a brilliantly tedious link. But believe us when we say we didn’t forget, we just found this band whilst sifting through the mounds of shite we have to listen to. This week’s crazy German band, Like A Stuntman provide us with chilled acoustics, gentle electronic grooves and some stern vocals. Mmm, this’ll warm your cockles.
With hints of last week's MySpace Trawl band Tunng shining through, this is another band for those like their experimental music a little bit calmer than some of the heavier and louder things we’ve previously covered. But relax, we do have some loudness – and extremely specialist – acts lined up in the future. Lots of people are often put off by bands that come from countries who don’t predominantly speak the Queen’s English, as not being able to understand what they're saying doesn’t appeal to many. But not us here at hecklerspray. We love and respect people no matter what their national language (and we don’t want to be reported to Channel 4 about racism at all). So in case anyone believes that Like A Stuntman is singing in good old German, you’d have to give us a pound. If we had a bet on of course. Balls, we missed our chance there. Curses.
We don’t have a clear idea of who the various members of the band are called, but we certainly won’t make any stereotypical German gags of calling them Hans or Wolfgang for nothing more than our own childish amusement. But you can of course. But on a serious note, whoever the front man of Like A Stuntman is, he has one of those voices that quite clearly hasn’t gone through any vocal coaching before. It maintains a distinct raw crackly sound which, when combined with the calmness of the music, works extremely well. Think of singers like Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips and Karl Hyde of legendary godlike genius dance outfit Underworld. Maybe it’s all down to being an unestablished band that allows them to have the freedom to create such an unpolished sound. It definitely wouldn’t sound right if it had the production values if, say, some top producer like Timbaland had worked on it. Though to be fair, the chances of that happening are extremely slim.
With distorted wobbly drums that crash in and out throughout the tracks, sharp guitar licks and squeaky synthetic sounds it sounds like it could be a disaster waiting to happen with the unpolished vocals on top. But you know we wouldn’t recommend shit sounding stuff to you, as the aim of this feature is to provide you with stuff you never knew existed. Then you can use your new-found knowledge to make yourself look cool in the pub whilst everyone else talks about how good they think the Kaiser Chiefs new rubbish song is.
The sounds of Like A Stuntman do have a DIY feeling to them, but when you’re on such a small record label it is understandable that you’re more then likely going to be rushed for studio time. But give them a try, you may love them or hate them. Music’s just like Marmite when you truly think about it. Think about it.
Now usually we don’t tell you what we plan for the week ahead’s band, but next week we aim to deliver another first on this feature. Just when we didn’t think we could go one better, we proved ourselves wrong. Because we’re ace like that. Though we need to find the link…
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Carolina says
Nasty picture, but nice sounding. Good spot!