Hey Everyone

Scottish ‘fight-pop’ inventors Dananananaykroyd are a bit like that kid from school who was really weird but inexplicably intriguing at the same. The self-invented ‘fight-pop’ genre that they’ve slotted themselves into has enough pretentious connotations to keep you back 50 feet but the draw of their notoriously boisterous live gigs, the kind you just don’t get anymore, give you the shove you need to begin the tentative formation of a friendship. And so it was for this reason that Ragged Words found itself hanging out in my bedroom with the weird kid from school.

Hey Everyone is something of an anomaly, probably due to its schizophrenia. A mix of scrappy pop songs complete with hand-clapping and multi-vocalist choruses of ‘wooohhhs’ and name-chanting mingle with inaudible screeching metal numbers. Even within songs, the genre cocktail is mixed to maximum potency. ‘The Greater Than Symbol And The Hash’ begins life as a Pavement-esque guitar distorted tale and ends up morphing into some freakish love-child of Ozzy Osbourne and Marilyn Manson. Ozzy and Marilyn spring to mind because, unlike some more sinister metal-heads, there seems to be an underlying element of humour hidden in Callum Gunn’s demonic screams. There is the feeling that their high-octane, experimental sound is one part assault on modern music culture to two parts really-couldn’t-give-a-fuck attitude. From ‘The Greater Than Symbol And The Hash’ leading directly into the radio-friendly ‘Black Wax’ and beyond, its clear the band put a hell of a lot of thought into the track’s running order. This seemingly hapless flitting between the sinister and the delightful really shouldn’t work, but somehow the indulgent balance between hard and soft just seems to taste right, despite it being so, so wrong – a bit like a deep fried Mars bar. Maybe it’s a Scottish thing.

To be frank, this reviewer didn’t like this album to begin with;  it’s avant-garde hype seemed all a bit contrived. But sometimes when listening to something critically, one can tend to be a touch too eh, critical. To listen to this album properly is not to listen to it at all; rather just let it wash over you and envelop you in its manic folds. You’ll soon find that Dananananaykroyd are insanely rowdy, intimidatingly clever and, above all, a whole load of fun.