It’s OK! You can stop repeatedly pressing F5 on your keyboard or wake up from your marathon stint at the computer. The day is Thursday. It’s nearly time for work to finish (if you’ve got a shitty 9-5 job) and that means its time for us to roll out another MySpace Trawl which we know this week you're either going to absolutely love and want to tell your next door neighbour about, or you’ll detest it and wonder what we're on. We may as while tell you, it's Pepsi Max. How could we resist with that bird from Desperate Housewives trying to flog it off in that really bad advert.
Just like Marmite, this week’s Trawl is probably going to make you question some people’s interpretation of music. But then again this is what this feature is all about. Bringing you the weird, wonderful and the darker side of music is our aim. And this week we think we’ve achieved it. Say hello, dear heckler, to Cutting Pink With Knives.
First of all, Cutting Pink With Knives describe their sound as grindcore. What the hell is grindcore you say? Well despite everyone at hecklerspray chipping in a few pennies and bananas to fund a crack team of money scientists to find the answer out for us, they didn’t deliver the goods. Instead we had quite a hostile situation on our hands with mashed bananas flying everywhere. Not a pretty sight.
If we can sum it up, grindcore is a genre unlike no other. The songs are often short, sharp, punchy and leave you confused and dazed. Guitars are the usual weapon of choice but we’ve focused on Cutting Pink With Knives because they also dabble in warped electronics to twist their sound even more. Vocals are another adventure in grindcore too. Most of the time it sounds like you’ve ran into wall of noise as unpronounceable lyrics are thrown at you. What we especially like are grindcore lyric booklets. You get to know what they're saying, but can’t quite follow them. But it’s all good fun kids. We promise.
Most run-of-the-mill pop songs, as an unwritten rule, have to usually last about three to four minutes. This is so the track can be given time to build and let people get accustomed to its sound. But not these songs. Blink and you’ll miss them is all we're saying. Hey Cowboy, the second of the three available for listening on the Cutting Pink With Knives MySpace page, clocks in at a staggering 44 seconds. Everything is condensed and squashed together to form a listen that is reminiscent of hurtling down a rollercoaster drop. It may not last long, but damn it’s good, and leaves you wanting to listen again and again.
Hey Cowboy actually gives us a slight intro, if you could call it one. Another track entitled Black Tigers Start Red Fires is even shorter at 33 seconds and just begins and ends with pure fucking noise that if turned up loud will either cause all the spotty nerds on the estate to rise up and rebel against something or drive your parents/ loved ones/ budgie to go insane as the sound penetrates their mind, body and soul. Despite sounding so angry and brutal, it weirdly sounds like it has been carefully and lovingly created by the band.
People will dismiss this as a group of blokes going in to a recording studio while seemingly off their heads on a mixture of substances and just recording madness. But it’s not! Well, not to us anyway, we're quite drawn to it. Mainly because of how different it sounds and because Cutting Pink With Knives have some ace track names too. Even though it's not listed on their MySpace page, one of the tracks on their album Oh Wow is bizarrely called Didi Got Fisted At The Smiths Disco. We have no idea if this is a personal experience involving someone from the band, or indeed with that miserable twat Morrisey from The Smiths, but its fun to chortle at over a cup of tea and a fruit bun.
And we do that a lot. Chortle.
Cutting Pink With Knives MySpace Page
[story by Matthew Laidlow]