Life, eh? Just a few days ago I was making a song-and-dance about how there was almost no guitar music on ANBAD these days… and now this week has seen virtually nothing else.
To the outsider, this may appear to demonstrate that I have no idea what I’m doing. There, of course, is a hefty grain of truth in this.
But if bands like Blonde Bunny keep popping up, and they just happen to be fascinating, and they just happen to be guitar based bands, what am I to do? Reject them for some generic bass-music remix?
Blonde Bunny are, indeed, curious for one main reason: they zip between categorisation like OCD bumblebees- epic prog one moment, weird psyche another, leftfield musique concrete yet another.
And How Do You Cope, Hope? is just one mad, eight-minute swirl of wonderful sounds following other wonderful sounds.
How Do You Cope, Hope? flits between reference points so subtly that everyone is, at least, convinced that listening further is a good idea. This is a song of technical and sonic brilliance, but, crucially, treads that laser-thin line between brilliant and nonsense with consummate ease.
Defying easy genrefication is easy – just cobble a load of sounds together, et voila: you please no-one, and are ignored on a truly grand scale. Blonde Bunny, conversely, do pretty much the same thing, and yet are mesmerising. And the song has a false ending. Perfect.
Written by Joe Sparrow
