Do Me Bad Things ‘Yes!’

added 12 April 2005 at 10.01

So flawlessly do they mirror key elements of the industry’s recent success stories, it’s difficult to believe Do Me Bad Things weren’t painstakingly spliced together in a NASA lab.

They weren’t of course – those who still believe that such things are important will be relieved to hear that DMBT authentically gathered themselves together whilst gigging round Croydon, which is about as far from a NASA gene lab as it’s possible to get without purposefully infecting yourself with Ebola. But it’s still difficult to imagine whichever fortunate A&R man stumbled across them doing anything other than masturbating into his own eyes with glee that his job should be so easy. Do Me Bad Things, you see, are what the industry likes to call ‘fully formed’.

On this occasion this means that they possess all the strengths of a recent success story like Scissor Sisters (flamboyantly camp frontman, killer tunes). Wonderful as this alone would be, things are thankfully a tad more complex – there’s more than a hint of The BellRays (goddess-like female vocalist who calmly flicks from gospel to R ‘n’ B to rock without breaking a sweat) with the whole shebang built around a Hard Working Rock Band core and rounded off nicely by a brace of backing vocalists plucked from the child benefit queue down the social, a la The Commitments.

From the opening, mind-fuckingly anthemic, soul-soaringly uplifting ‘Time For Deliverance’, on which the triumvirate of vocalists rain down scorn and redemption upon your ears in roughly equal measures – “you lied/you compromised/You said yourself you wanted to be free”  the ‘Things don’t carry an ounce of superfluous weight, every member locking together with a flawless grace that’s rare in bands a third of their size. ‘…Deliverance’ is, admittedly, the finest song on the album by some margin but as a peak to slowly descend from it’s up there with Kilimanjaro.

‘The Song Rides’ follows, a confrontational tract on the evil of music biz manipulation (something DMBT, with nine mouths to feed, are going to be particularly susceptible to) before Camp Thing Nicolai Prowse takes his turn at the mike for the rollercoaster funk of ‘Sprezzatura’. It’s the first of several tracks giving the various vocalists some solo limelight; third single ‘What’s Hideous?’ sees Gospel Thing Chantal Brown lead the band through a furious blues/funk workout while gravel-throated Hellfire Thing Mark Woods breathes fire and brimstone over the heaving metal riffs of ‘The Daily Grind’.

It doesn’t always work – ‘Off The Hook’ dissolves into a directionless haze of stop-start rhythm that never really gets going, while ‘Molly’s Wood’ promises much with its buzzsaw riffage but fails to develop beyond that.

But when they’re not getting lost in the schizophrenic potential of their own talent, Do Me Bad Things lock together and hit rarely-scaled heights of joyous diversity to deliver an insanely promising, if slightly flawed, debut. You’d be a fool to bet against Do Me Bad Things doing some very, very good things before they get much older. Keep the faith, brothers and sisters.

Dave Collyer

Do Me Bad Things ‘Yes!’ (Must Destroy Records) Released April 11 2005.

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