The Show is the Rainbow - Wet Fist

Initially coming across as some strain of novelty act, The Show is the Rainbow’s sophomore album contains many moments of musical brilliance. This one-man band calls upon Why? and Beck’s tendency to smash’n’grab amongst genres to create a space odyssey of easy-going psychedelic flower rock, yelp-hop, bouncing glitch jazz, squelchy screamo-funk, country squeal and delusions of Frank Zappa. If the collage composition often dazzles, it’s Darren Keen’s vocals which drag the sound into novelty territory, eructating fudgy melodies and atrocious pseudo-rapping, somewhere between Presidents of the United States of America and the cocky, whining style of which Yoni Wolf is so fond. The lyrics continue this strange juxtaposition with the music, being mostly on the wrong side of college humour, such as a story revolving around freezing to death mid-coitus. It’s a strange album, as wonderful and complex as it is cheap and crass; the musical equivalent of doublethink, then.