The Fishery Commission: "Fear Not The Fax"

If chiptune’s serious about becoming the protopunk of the MacBook generation, then where the hell is its Jeremy John Ratter? Sure, there’s plenty of hackers out there who can make those Ataris sing like sugar gliders, but what the genre lacks is some kind of legitimate vocal figurehead; someone whose wordplay can outfox the buttons and get more than just the LAN regulars listening. Two years ago I’d have sworn blind it’d be these guys, Newcastle’s mighty Fishery Commission, had they not been beat to the post a la Scott-versus-Amundsen by a sagacious scout party: Ethan Kath and Alice Glass of the dastardly Crystal Castles. Yes, while you were out, the carnivorous tune-stealing blog-lurker and his ex-glamour trophy minx snuck deep into the 8-bit community. The Emperor’s New Clothes were duly spun and tailored, and Fish Commish frontman Spoonbender was left to watch his beloved genre peddled across NME circulars before flopping into a “mild Brian Wilson episode.” Presumably this involved spending sixteen years marooned on a coral shoreline, getting hot and podgy while the waves failed to straighten out his cutlery and cocaine poured in like the riptide. No bottles to write home in, no link-up cable for Tetris.

Well, Ethan Kath and Alice Glass can suck my turboencabulator because the Commish are back on dry land, and by jingo they’re sounding flightier than ever. Describing themselves as “hypermelodic gameboy blip-hop that sounds like Jan Hammer smoking his shoes,” Dominic Spoonbender Smith mixes his sweet bleeps around Andy Browntown’s operatic vocals in a way that defies both logic and expectation. How Player 2 can hold a tune to Player 1’s hi-score combos is the eighth wonder of the world, but hold it he most definitely does, with the end result reminiscent of Billy Bragg’s vocalist-plus-one-electric-guitar origins. “Fear Not The Fax,” the first of two demos to undergo studio restoration, is a bubbly fanfare for honest nostalgia as Browntown laments the mould-breaking eighties technology, crooning of “automated words and a liquid crystal smile.” Spoonbender’s pad acrobatics flash like the Mushroom Kingdom behind him, turning what could be a ten-second aside into seven minutes of rose-tinted loveliness. If you fancy having your childhood tickled but aren’t too hot about cool lists, you might like to know the lads are currently considering gig offers in order to keep those scales a-glimmering. Why not dangle them a worm.

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