Mower

The Garage, London

Perverse bastards, Mower. They start songs with fine, crunching riffs. Then stop them again, almost instantly. Someone (a jazzer, probably) once said that great music’s all about what you leave out, rather than put in. And Mower — an askew north London trio on the fast-track to indie celebrity on a par with, say, Hefner, if they wouldn’t keep splitting up- do pregnant pauses that threaten sextuplets.

Fortunately, the surrounding splenetic guitar outbursts are monumental, too. You can smell the jizz stains on ‘After Dark”s juvenile powerpop, while on ‘No-One Is Royalty’’s tale of clubbing misadventures, moptopped frontman Matt dispenses with lyrics to sneer, ‘Blah blah blahblah-blah!”

“This song will kill us one day,” he overstates, before lurching into ‘Wake Up Mower’ - Nirvana as reimagined by bonkers art-poppers The Futureheads. With all superfluous knobs on his guitar taped down and glamorous new recruit Nash making like Lemmy on the fuzz bass, it’s as primitive and playful as a lusty afterhours arm-wrestle.

Blur and Idlewild producer Stephen Street recently made an attempt at taming these monsters of quirk, making bona fide anthem status for such controlled madness a distinct possibility come the festival season. If they keep it together long enough. Martin Horsfield Originally published in NME, 31 May 2003

Footnote: I’m 100% certain that this gig wasn’t at the Garage. But I would have subedited this as well. Don’t know what happened there. Also, I’m surprised that I left out one pertinent detail: that Blur’s Graham Coxon turned up - with a sausage in his pocket.