http://www.subba-cultcha.com/article_album.php?id=6606
Dec 07

I’m not entirely sure whether Thumpermonkey Lives! know where they’re coming from. They’re basically a completely unique mix of prog rock (complete with some of the most ambitious arrangements known to Rush, never mind mankind), metal, Devin Townsend, Monty Python and Jethro Tull, all at the same time and the square root of inversely in an infinite series of parallel universes simultaneously.

This lot must have spent so long in the rehearsal studio they lost al the pigment in their skin. Inspired by the likes of The Melvins, Frank Zappa and Isis, they have broken through the nonsense door on the safe buried under the cellar of the locked house with the sign outside saying “There’s No Way That Can Be Pulled Off In Music”, and shat in Mr Nonsense’s shoes. And his hat. And then pulled off what seemingly anti-gravity feat of utter sonic insanity was being debated in the first place.

This is a truly remarkable record. It’s not for the faint hearted – don’t even attempt it unless you’ve had a hearty breakfast of Genesis with a side order of King Crimson, and been snacking on Primus and Tool all morning. But if, like me, you need a full injection of Yes and Magma into each testicle before I can get out of bed in the mornings, you’ll shortly realise that “Bring Me Sun For Breakfast” is so good it’ll make you spunk, AND it’s available directly from their website for a fiver…

By: EDDIE THOMAS

http://www.corazine.com
Nov 09

“Thumpermonkey Lives!” is the project of Michael Woodman (vocals and guitars), Mike Hutchinson (bass) and David Croshaw (drums). The instrument’s line-up is rather classic for a rock formation, the music is not as a matter of course. On the contrary! Their latest release “Bring Me Sun For Breakfast” (2007), after four other productions since 2001, rather is an oddball in the music scene. The two keywords must be alternative and progressive. And I would add “experimental” with that too. Do I have your attention now?

“Bring Me Sun For Breakfast” shows a blend of sharp colours on the disc cover. The mixture holds on in the music. Five tracks shape this disc, and they reach a state of surrealistic soundscape. The band proposed “progressive metal” as a style name. If it is necessary, I would prefer the tag “progressive rock” or “alternative rock”. But I do notice why “Thumpermonkey Lives!” choose for an open-minded metallic term. A lot of influences come to the foreground and assert certain pigeonhole rights. The intensity of genre pulls is huge. And it is my believe that the musicians of “Thumpermonkey Lives!” don’t give a damn about a specific style: every categorization is artificial and more than once out of place.

The all round sound of “Thumpermonkey Lives!” is kind-hearted, yet never at ease. The chaos effects are prominent. Don’t get me wrong: It is no chaoscore or mathmetal. The changes in pace and different kind of music styles guarantee an eclectic product. The whole however has a measured appearance. It’s a mixture of the humour of Shellac and doom from Isis, with the vocals of Queen with rhythm lines of David Bowie. The guitar riffs can be derived from a sludge band, but a genuine alternative rocker could have borrowed his instrument’s touch too. This is creativity at its best!

Nov 09

London Zoo is missing some monkeys: 3 thumpermonkeys! They disappeared 2 years ago on a sunny day in autumn. The London police department thinks they got away in the guitarcase of some buskers. Everyone who has a signal of these monkeys, please check out ‘Bring me sun for breakfast’. The brand new LP of the schizophrene Thumpermonkeys (full name: Thumpermonkey lives!). The monkeys surely know how to play music.

TL only needs five songs to make a musical collage that combines the 70’s with hyperkinetic 00’s. As TL pretends not to play working men’s rugby hardcore nor white middle-trash stoner rap or B-movie surf-goth, they just sound like it! Or they play the doomversions of these styles. It starts very slowly but sometimes this record explodes into arty ziggy-rock or hyperkinetic monkey’n roll. I would call this the doom-version of Faith No More. The vocals remind of Patton, the nervous repeating riffs too. ‘The drill’ is the perfect example! ‘Asypmtote’ and ‘Slug city’ are heavy as hell. This shit is as heavy as 3 monkeys fighting for a banana in the London Zoo and easy as a sundayafternoon pinknick in the Zoo. So original, so complete and sometimes even danceable. I would say TL serves the sun during breakfast. Thumpermonkeys are.. go!

http://mashnote.net/index2.php?page=2&id=723

Schrodinger’s Cat Lives (demo) – Twisted churning progressive metal from South London, the demo is called Bring Me The Sun For Breakfast – a ferocious mix of Isis, Van Der Graaf and Melvins – oh yes!

www.new-noise.net

Thumpermonkey Lives! exist to confound us. Long live Thumpermonkey Lives! If their name is a grammatical minefield that’ll leave even the most pedantic of us perplexed, then their music is an unwieldy Renaissance mural of David Bowie doing an impression of Frank Zappa smoking a whopping bifter after sating himself on an aperitif of hardcore, Earl Zinger and probably a festival ham & Kraft cheese sandwich, on wholemeal naturally. Confused? Excellent.

This apocalyptic racket ebbs and flows between some kind of art experiment and a balls out rock record. It’s a true delight. The incredible complex layers, twists, turns and impossibly erudite lyrical musings barely cling onto the ever changing tempo making it a demanding listen but one that’ll enrich your musical being if you give it but a chance.

But surely something that sounds so preposterously up its own arse can’t work? I hear you cry, to which I reply it just does. Listen to ‘The Drill’ and you’ll understand; 3 minutes 59 of pure hedonistic pleasure doom rock that contains one of the longest preambles to a joke in songwriting history. Fact. "Two lesbian communards, a cloned manatee, a scientologist, a raffle of turkeys, a dyspraxic stealth-bomber pilot, Noam Chomsky and a paediatrician, along with a self-harming nun, a man who just received a pig heart xeno-transpalnt, an albino luddite and Alex Chiu walk into a bar." Glorious isn’t it?

NN couldn’t tell you how the already epic ‘Slug City’ ends, after eight and half minutes of groin achingly, subversive, ambitious rock sound scapes that’ll make even the most impotent of men twinge with excitement, the CD NN has been provided with ceases to work with at least another two minutes left to run; we’re gutted.

There isn’t really a lot more to say about this album other than go buy, go listen, go love. Good monkey.

Prog bleedin' rock mate! The self indulgent cool as F real fugging thing – all long winded and taking an age to unfold and they've got no horns and they've got tails and they don't even know of our existence. Not one of your indie-smindy post hardcore bands claiming to be progressive because they borrowed one of the easier At The Drive-In riffs, or yet another noodling post-rock copy of the Explosions in Your Emperor thing. No! This is the full on weird wired bombastic Rael in his Lighthouse in the court of crimson u-boat real big Gentle Giant, Isis deal. Cram five songs in to one and takes us through all kinds of melodic light, shade and moody atmosphere (and strange lyrics that I haven't quite deciphered yet, Scientology in the woodshed and you know the drill).

Actually they sound like an easier to digest Sleepy People (without the hardboiled Pere Ubu vocal style and the slightly twee bits) and with more than a healthy hint of the mighty Sensational Alex Harvey Band – and they have this deliciously dirty edge and filthy sludgy guitar sounds (and they're cool enough to name drop Ian Gillan in Jesus Christ Superstar – now that is cool!). You see, you progheads out there who like it polite and sanitized and cleancut (and boring) like Porcupine (yawn) Tree are these days, or all you fans of those dull conservative prog by numbers Spocks Beard outfits - if that's what you like then you're going to run a mile from this, you'll run off like fat squealing neo-prog piggies back to your safe little inside out world of Pendragon offshoot bands and Marillion without Fish blandness, run piggy run piggy run run run, back to your office, back to your grave, the feeder is.... – but those of you who loved Poisoned Electrick Head and Sleepy People and Cheese Cake Truck and Camp Blackfoot and now love Fantomas and Tool and Isis and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and the punky edge of those Cardiacs and yes Gillan and 70's Genesis and Alex Harvey and the great god Hammill and Houses of The Holy – yes indeed imagine Gillan but cool enough in terms of energy and attitude to be on Discord Records with an Albini edge and hard boiled heavyweight maths and yes! Nothing too hard boiled though, this is not 'difficult' or 'awkward', beautifully melodic and dramatically paced actually, nothing thrashy or punky – well at least not in the noisy sense.

There's three of them, dirty guitars, delicate guitars, quiet guitars and battling counterbalanced riffs that revolve around each other rather than the usual staple of progrock keyboards – fugging 'ell this is brilliant! It was good from the off but now I've been chewing on it for a bit, this is brilliant!. Five songs, five epics, not in terms of length (although they all feel longer than they actually are!), epic in terms of content, in terms of musical drama, light and shade. There's a massive ten minute track that feels like twenty minutes at the end). Ah look, real deal must-have ear food, excellent, word had been seeping out over the river from South London about this band, word was right, and we should have mentioned The Melvins as well.

http://www.organart.demon.co.uk/neworgan217.htm

I became a Thumpermonkey fan whilst listening to their last album, “Chap with the Wings, Five Rounds Rapid”. They had me at “Come on, rub some creatine on my gums!” so to speak, which is not to say that it was an easy indoctrination. It is demanding music, full of twists, turns, complex melodies, even more complex time signatures, and a vocabulary that sends even the most bookish scrambling to their rhyming thesaurus. That being said, the devoted are rewarded with music that has a lasting, enjoyable depth and a level of craft uncommon in contemporary acts.

I was looking forward to similar challenges and rewards when I received the new work “Bring me Sun for Breakfast”. The cover jumped out at me right away being both vibrant and dark, with a whirly-gig of sunshine-like color set against a black background that I found myself immediately drawn to. This was a portent of things to come.

The album opens with My Reality is Stronger, which clocks in at a nigh-epic 8:12. I was immediately struck by how remarkably subdued much of the song was, an odd choice for an album starter, when many hard rock acts would be trying to grab your attention with something fast and hooky. Now, I understand how loathe some musicians are to have their music compared to other bands, in large part because everyone seems compelled to do so instead of focusing on what the music is in-and-of itself. However, in the context of a review, it is useful to provide the reader a sense of what they would hear should they take the time to check out the band so let me get this out of the way.

As a reviewer you want to give people at least two bands for reference, one of which is well known such that everyone will be able to relate to it, and a second band which is suitably obscure, thus securing your cache as a source with a “prodigious knowledge of bands”. It’s a ridiculous scam really, however, to that end, I’m going to say that My Reality sounds kind of like the love child product of Jeff Buckley and the delightful Surry prog-punkers, the Cardiacs. If you like either of these bands, fantastic, perhaps I have enticed you. On the other hand, if you detest either or both bands, don’t worry, as the album departs from here, getting darker and heavier as it progresses. I could also tell you the song sounds very much like Thumpermonkey, which, while perhaps more accurate, doesn’t really help the uninitiated.

Track two, the very enjoyable The Drill, is probably closest to the content on the last album, being faster and rockier, and surprisingly accessible. It was while listening to this on my first pass that I realized that I was going to “get” this album faster than the last one. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I have already got myself into a Thumpermonkey mindset, but I think perhaps it’s also due to a more refined sense of song craft being brought to bear on this album. Lyrically it is an excellent demonstration of the interesting and quite unconventional way that Mr. Woodman is able to string together words into a kind of Dadaist poetry, complete, in this case, with a joke with no apparent punch line. While lacking, perhaps, in coherent literal meaning, it is rife with thought provoking imagery, that, or maybe I’m just not getting it when he sings repeatedly about alternately making, hiding, burning and consuming maps. It’s still a cracking good tune, you know the drill.

Third up is another lengthy track, Asymptote, at the also distinctively radio-unfriendly 7:35. This track continues the album’s progression in to brooding full-on hardcore rock with a metal take on the Simpson’s theme (kind of) opening the track before it starts to really slam after a minute and a half of intro. A lesser song would already be over by this point. There seems to be a Tool influence clearly at play here, so if you like that music of that pedigree, I suspect you’ll very much enjoy this track.

Fourth up is perhaps my immediate favorite track on the album, Schrödinger’s Cat Lives!. It is brutally heavy and musically full of rage. This seemed at odds with the happy, erudite Michael Woodman that I had the opportunity to sit down and have a lunch with at a Tooting pub just prior to their CD launch gig where we waxed eloquent about the 4 M’s (music, mating, marriages, mortgages). It also contrasts with the lyrics of the track, which read either as a touching tale of unrequited love, or if you take the musical tone into mind, perhaps the rantings of a disturbed stalker. I enjoy this song very much, however, I wish that they had taken more time to open up on the main riff for longer before returning to the palm muted chugging insanity between the second and third verses, thus facilitating neck injuries from vigorous, prolonged head-banging.

Ending the album is the also epic Slug City, the longest track on the album at just over 10 minutes long. In many ways I find this song to be the counterpart of Doughboy from Chap with the Wings. It is a heavy, dirgy tone poem, starting off with Bass and Baritone tuned guitars establishing a dark mood. I recall in my review of Chap that I had hoped that Douhgboy would break into some galloping riffage at its conclusion, and it seems that perhaps my wish has been granted with this track, as the last half of the song builds from a progressively heavier jam to a section that while not quite galloping, is certainly the heaviest on the album. This will scare the neighbors with it’s rumbling, earth rending, low end. It is a logical progression over it’s sister track from the earlier album in much the same way that while Metallica’s Ride the Lightning is similar in structure and content to Master of Puppets, the songs on ‘Puppets demonstrate a musical growth as the band matured. I contend that it is exactly this kind of metamorphosis we see here on this track, and indeed, across the album as a whole.

All in all, I know that a considerably larger sum of money was spent on the production of this album over the last, and while both sound very good from that point of view, there is definitely an extra layer of gloss on this latest offering. I don’t know if it’s the order of magnitude of improvement in-line with the difference in costs, but as I didn’t have to pay to record it, all I have to be concerned with is my enjoyment as a listener.

I believe that Messieurs Woodman, Hutchinson and Croshaw have outdone themselves. Simply put, Bring Me Sun for Breakfast is equal parts beautiful, British and brutal. Fans of progressive metal take note: Thumpermonkey Lives!

Rating:
8 Points and a Free Subscription to the Wire (out of a possible 11 points)
MORE BORON RODS!!!!

Lots of little bite-size reviews of "My Reality Is Stronger".