Max & Malcolm - Max & Malcolm

Incredible privately pressed minimal post-punk oddity by former Metabolist member Malcolm Lane and a certain Max Headroom. No synth nonsense, but some cold, bare and lo-fi pop experimentations, like some sort of experimental cousin of Young Marble Giants. Recalling Mark Barreca, Savant’s Sensible Music EP, and of course, Psychic TV, etc.

This Max & Malcolm LP is quite a mystery, and an exquisite one. Not a total mystery, though, as some of the musicians credited on the LP were related to the late 1970’s London experimental band Metabolist. But the rest is quite obscure, and so is the music.

Each side is supposedly led by one of the two young British men starring at you on the artwork. And indeed, there seem to be two different set of songs. Malcolm’s side is more drum-machines relying, more easily identifiable as minimal wave. Whereas the music on the Max side is so diverse, ranging from minimal loner ballads (« Inside ») to mutant ethio-jazz (« Slow Dancing »), that it’s quite hard to understand the role of that mysterious Max Headroom figure, surrounded by musicians from Malcolm’s band Metabolist, that it seems to be nothing more than a red herring, as the whole project seems to be anyway.

However, it’s not the kind of messy pot-pourri you might imagine, on the contrary, it’s extremely tense and coherent, all the songs bathing in the same faint glauque light. A true manifesto of DIY post-punk, and a testimony of youth’s uncompromising power to create new artistic forms from scratch. (VG+/VG+)

Tracklist

1. Are The Trumpets Ready?
2. Slow Dancing
3. Why do Tigers Wander Thru My Mind?
4. Palest Of Places
5. Their Ghosts do Shimmer
6. inside
7. High Adventure
8. Into Space
9. Lost People
10. Warning
11. Wild Beast