Filed under: Musical
Readers of Oxford music magazine Nightshift will be pleased to learn that Junk and Stuff has been honoured with the prestigious title of Demo of the Month. Ally Craig has accepted the award with characteristic grace and humility, and is pleased to learn that he is not a “useless fucking arsehole” as was previously suspected. You are invited to bask in the gently humming glow of the review below.
Ally, bless him, politely hopes we like his demo and don’t call him “a useless fucking arsehole”, as if that were ever a possibility. He then proceeds to open the CD with a minute-long piece of barely-coherent rambling and strumming called ‘Work in Progress’, as if he’s deliberately inviting critical abuse and alienating any potential fans. Luckily for him we’ve got more patience than most of the modern day idiocracy’s ringtone-obsessed numbskulls and thus make it through to ‘A Train Then A Train Then A Train’, which showcases Ally’s idiosyncratic charms more fully, his emotionally-taut, quavering croak infusing even the most urgently haphazard of musical passages with character. It’s not just Ally’s voice that reminds us of Robert Wyatt; his tendency towards the deliberately obtuse and the feeling that he neither knows nor particularly cares where songs are going or at what pace, and the feeling that the whole demo could well have been written and recorded in under half an hour, echoes Wyatt’s fan-baiting style at times. The most stark example of this is ‘ Angular Spirals’, wherein Ally’s voice becomes a weirdly operatic falsetto and an uncertainly-plucked acoustic guitar steals the riff from ‘Are Friends Electric?’ before chugging off to join T-Rex. Well, tough titty Ally, we’re on to your little game and it won’t work – we’re gonna damn well enjoy your music.
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Bug Prentice 