(from CWSY#8, Feb '02) / home / reviews index

Edible 5 Ft. Smiths - 'Milk Race Over Quebec' (demo album)
Though they can provoke laughter in a silent room merely with a consciously dodgy lyric, a glockenspiel and some sleigh bells (where else but on 'The Christmas Song' - "happy Christmas, I hope you die"), (the) Edibles are no comedy band. They have a song about children drowning that's implausibly heavy for any normal 'indie' band!

They're possibly the most charming mid-point between the unique and the accessible that I've experienced in my experience of experiencing this kind of shit.

Edibles songs swerve and skid around, remembering to take the audience with them. Take the breathless intro of 'Born Under A Bad Pine' leading into a Shellac-does-Blur deconstruction, before some quasi-reggae keyboarding. Or 'Canadian Love Song', beginning in an outside-broadcast style, then like Clinic remixing the Manics' great 'Australia', re-located to a place even more freaky (not Hull, but Canada). The doo-woppish harmonies hint at the almost-acapella 'Angelfriend', while the plural voices are put to vicious effect on 'Ole': live, Matt and Jonny seem to be competing for who can open their mouth widest, who can yowl with the most intensity. Meanwhile Ian drums like a man running for his life through thick forest - while on the shambolically wonderful 'We Were Not Drunk' the quartet are joined, amongst others with less-strong voices, by Hawksley Workman to provide a touch more class.

A band overflowing with songs just begging to be released, a band worth sitting through crap supports for; a band I'm not sure how to sum up...

Matt Thompson, Flat 1, 43 Ryde Street, Hull, HU5 1PB.