By Jack

On a song that is as much Can as Pulled Apart By Horses, Leeds based duo Menace Beach craft sublime vamp-rock on ‘Crawl in Love’.

If the title alone wasn’t Martin Gore enough for you, ‘Crawl in Love’ is a twisted, distorted song about the futility of love, or the love of futility: depending on your outlook.

It takes craft to make an instrument not sound like an instrument, and the synthesised opening sounds more like errant squalls than anything borne of keys. A familiar surge of guitar and synths restores a little more normalcy, but Menace Beach balance precariously between the grass roots indie that fostered them and the strange possibilities of electronic experimentation.

‘Crawl in Love’ moves at a krautrock thrum, beneath the more contemporary indie framework and the persistent wash of analogue synths. It’s grainy and grimy enough to appeal to indie heads, although the band’s own claims that the song is a work of radiant positivity may raise an eyebrow. This is too complex, too cloudy to extract anything so universal. But it is great fun to pick over. Black Rainbow Sound can’t come soon enough.