“Don’t it always seem to go,” mused Joni Mitchell, “that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”. Quite possibly, you querulous folk activist, you, but to balance this we find that sometimes we have no idea we needed something until it turns up. For example, a year or so ago we were all living our lives quite oblivious to the fact that what Oxford music really required was a masked duo that sound like a cross between Felix Da Housecat and Autechre. But then we discovered Coloureds.
This record follows on from where their last left off, taking shiny, flexy club music and folding it in on itself like intricate dancefloor origami. The title track sounds like it could once have been a perky, approachable piece of contemporary house, replete with a near pornographic video of cheerleaders working out and getting caught in a thunderstorm, that Coloureds have stuck through a shredder and stuck back together in any old order. There’s a fascinating balance in the music between an enticingly simple bounce in the drums, and a jittering, fractal collection of keyboard snatches and vocal fragments that is just too swift for the ear to comfortably accommodate.
‘Monocle’ is really more of the same, although it has a slightly more coherent lead keyboard line, bringing it closer to the more abrasive strains of funky. ‘Do You Want To Come Back To My Room And Listen To SebastiAn?’ uses the same recipe, but stirs in some distorted and sliced guitar from This Town Needs Guns’ Tom Collis, and has a clumsy euphoria that’s refreshing: like the best of Coloureds’ music, it’s neither the all-consuming Nuremberg glitter thump of High Street club music, nor the academic prissiness of the current micro-generation of IDM, but manages to find a space where the feet want to dance even as the mind gets lost in a hall of sonic mirrors. Oh, and it sounds like that little Pixar anglepoise all growed up, and out of its tiny bulb on its first E.
To be brutally frank, listening to all five tracks of this EP consecutively becomes a trifle wearing, especially as two are remixes of the title track (although one is mixed by SHHH! THE DEAF HAVE AIDS, which may or may not be the greatest arrangement of five words in the English language), and brilliant as Coloureds’ skitterstep tricks are, after a while you just yearn for a simple melody, or a vocal that can stay in one place for two beats together. But, whilst it’s possible to sit and marvel at the ingenious construction of the EP, it’s not made to be digested at leisure, and as a live act, or as creators of music to be heard punishingly loud in a damp cellar, Coloureds are far and away the best in Oxford. If life is just a box of chocolates, on the Tom Hanks EP Coloureds have smooshed them all up into one giant confectionary ball. And filled it with tequila. Tuck in.