Theses days, taking a punt on the well-worn marketing move, where you take a less-is-more attitude to what you allow the public to know and see of your new band, is nothing short of fucking boring. It’s more reactionary, rather than revolutionary, seeming as it does to kick against the over-saturation of any subject the Internet chews up and spits out. Blame the bloggers and their insatiable appetite, blame the social networks and their tiny attention spans. Blame what you like, it’s very over-cooked and if you are going to try and drip feed us with miniature snippets of confusing information then you better be fucking awesome when you get around to the big reveal.
Just look at the recent (and bloody lengthy) IAmAmIWhoAmI viral video campaign, where obscure clips of David Lynch-like weirdness gave us short peeks at a new artist by the dozen over a whole year. Amazing intrigue was soon followed by frustrating guessing games by those with zero patience, eventually outing the artist to everyone well before the campaign was completed. Here we are over a year later and they’ve still not released anything. OK, so we will still take a look once it comes out, but it won’t be accompanied by the shortened breath and dribbling excitement that they wanted.
That’s the trouble with these image campaigns, they’re fighting an increasingly vapid and insatiable beast called Generation Y, who simply cannot survive on controlled portions. They get bored and move on, muttering “whateva” under their breath as they turn their attention elsewhere. You can’t really blame them, it’s what commercial capitalism always wanted – buy something – get bored with it quickly – buy the next model please. The Internet simply taught them to digest more, faster, so the whole attention thing has sped up to light speed – or should that be cyber speed?
Anyway, those with said attention spans probably haven’t even read down this far into the article to notice that Wu Lyf, a band that have done their best to hop away from the lime lights over the last couple of years, are arriving in Brighton to play a show at The Green Door Store tonight. One thing that’s kept our attention stems from the fact that they are the bastard children of Foals and Health, making extraordinary sounds from behind their masked obscurity. For this reason alone, they are worthy of your investigation. You might even get to see their faces and everything.
The band name stands for World Unite / Lucifer Youth Foundation and they hail from Manchester – an area that’s been particularly saturated in very good, very original bands over the last two or three years, which might go some way to explain why Wu Lyf are taking their time. The news of their debut album, Go Tell Fire To The Mountain, breached yesterday as they gave us the due date of June 13th, via, wait-for-it, a mysterious video. See that below, alongside the video for their track, ‘Spitting It Concrete Like The Golden Sun God‘, which even had Michel Gondry chasing them up.
Like any cult, they’re only interested in control. They’re mythical revolutionaries that shunned the queue of major labels to release music on their own. However, like all of these contrived projects, it’s what is discovered inside the resulting music and clever designs once the smoke and mirrors are removed, that will have us concluding whether we actually want to follow or not. If more is found once the less has left, then our patience and their project will have been worthwhile. Tonight (22nd March) we have this live performance as a first proper sample, at the perfectly-suited Green Door Store in Brighton (last few tickets here) and we can all begin to decide for ourselves. The real test is whether we are all still as interested the day afterwards, once we’ve experienced the substance beyond the contrived style. (MB)
WU LYF – HEAVY POP
WU LYF – CONCRETE GOLD
