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With poetical and mythological references abound, you might want to nip out and get a PhD before listening to this album. Or you could just sit back and enjoy the off the wall sounds and somewhat unusual humour of front man Jesse Budd and Co. Opening with an ode to the dog in the title, ‘Cerberus Is As Cerberus Does’ is an attempt to turn the snake-tailed, multi-headed guard dog of Hades into a domestic, almost lovable character. Spangly, echoing tones merge into some off beat percussion as some low-slung guitars nudge in. Budd sings playfully “if you pat one head you’ve got to pat the rest” as the organ oozes out in between like the cream in a rather sinister cake.
One of the most noticeable things about Flipron is their passion for making sounds from the most decrepit instruments and the most unusual objects; they even pointed a microphone at a toilet to er, harvest its noises. In the track ‘Ball And Chain’, they use a plant pot scraped against the floor and a rusty old chain to create the sound. This is underpinned by sparse piano tinklings and a bandy-legged guitar. The tune, about carrying your regrets around like a ball and chain, really kicks off mid-way through as a gothic sounding violin and clarinet slink in, as hypnotising as a snake in a basket.
Things get even stranger with ‘The Flatpack Bride Of Possibilities’; the gentle and humming organ taking on an increasingly sinister tone as Budd, sounding a tad like a young Marc Bolan, begins to describe the soft dough muscles, vital organs in a sealed box and the milk white bones that he’s been posted to be assembled. Despite the Frankenstein-like overtones, this is actually a rather touching song about how the person you fall in love with is never, ever what you imagined them to be like.
‘Youth Shall Never Beat Old Age In A Race’ is a bit of a jewel in the crown; sometimes criticised for being ageist, Budd explains “I’d thought that using a fictional figure of Youth to race against Old Age was fairly obvious as a metaphor for growing older, but there we are.” Either way, the tune is a glorious romp that sounds like Kula Shaker’s ‘K’ after being melted into a solid lump of psychedelic, pounding organs. The line “We have the flexi muscle tone, we have the breath, to catch a bag of knackered bones before its death” is particularly delicious. There is something wonderfully unhinged, macabre and playful about Flipron, who else would include an interlude comprising of the noises of a cheese grater, an egg slicer and a knife or come up with a song title like ‘Mingers In Paradise’? One thing’s for sure, there will not be anything like this in your music collection.
