Fight Like Apes - The Body of Christ and the Legs of Tina Turner

Here at Ragged Words, we were rather smitten with Fight Like Apes’ quirky, witty and nearly-great debut The Mystery of the Golden Medallion. We liked their B-movie schtick, agreed that ‘Jake Summers’, ‘Lend me Your Face’ and ‘Something Global’ were superb, absurdly catchy pop songs, and that in MayKay, they had a sexy, uber-cool singer with genuine star quality – not something the Irish are noted for producing.  Indeed, when she asked us to ‘tie [her] up in jackets and fumigate [her] room / it smells like socks and tastes like apple schnapps and you can live there too’- one of the strangest come-ons you’ll ever hear- we were sorely tempted.

But deary me, this second album is just terrible. They’ve forgotten to write any good songs, instead ratcheting up the flaws evident on Medallion. The debut’s charm has been largely swept aside to reveal FLApes as a fairly obnoxious outfit. The constant stream of put-downs have lost their sense of fun and now just sound bitter and repetitive – they never seem to stop.  It’s unbearably tedious – it seems FLAapes still think there’s something shocking in saying ‘fuck’ a lot. There’s little sense of development from their debut on any level– the daft titles, bits of B-Movie dialogue and bleepy synths are all still there, but musically it’s a regression into the lumpen, joyless sludge that marred the last third of Medallion. There’s none of the spark of the band’s brilliant early singles. Only ‘Hoo Ha Henry’ has a memorable chorus, while ‘Kathmandu’ shows a lightness of touch that is all too rare.

There are some hideous musical choices here. If Medallion teetered on the edge of silliness, Body of Christ crosses the divide and falls into the dark realms of novelty pop. Song titles like ‘Poached Eggs, Waking Up With Robocop’ and ‘Ice Cream Apple Fuck’ only hint at the horrors within. Their worst abomination, though, is the persistent use of Pockets’ ghastly backing vocals. FLApes have a potential star in MayKay - if properly harnessed with decent tunes - so it’s impossible to fathom why Pockets is constantly interrupting her with his ear-punishing shouting. When all these unsavoury elements combine to produce songs as eye-wateringly bad as ‘Captain A-Bomb’ or the aforementioned ‘Robocop’, it’s staggering to think that this is the same band that briefly sounded like a new dawn in Irish pop.