Dananananaykroyd – Hey Everyone

Presenter

Jade Nobbs

Published

Tuesday 11th August

One becomes a little suspicious of the trend these days for bands to find increasingly vexing ways to name themselves. It seems it’s no longer adequate, in many cases, for an act to simply devise a grammatically and conceptually coherent name: rather, the very logic of “naming” has to be challenged, which has led to a whole slew of abstract and incoherent band names, such as !!!, OOIOO, UUVVWWZ, and—perhaps the originary instigator—“whoever the hell the artist is formerly known as Prince.”

The group under consideration here follows that anti-semantic tendency, and why they’ve chosen to run a tractor over the name of one of the Ghostbusters and call their band that is mystifying to say the least. And the bemusement that attracts to this kind of onomastic tomfoolery is underpinned by the suspicion that the outlandishness of the name may simply serve to conceal or deflect attention away from a derivative and unremarkable musical product. Unfortunately, with [insert silly name]—unlike many of the acts aforementioned—such suspicion proves to be well founded.

“Hey Everyone” is a well-meaning but uninspired fusion of dance-rock and hardcore motifs, and is far too redolent of a swathe of pre-existing bands, and the current trend for “rock made for dancefloors”, to have any sense of distinction. It’s as though Maximo Park, Franz Ferdinand, At The Drive-In, Plastic Constellations and Refused have got together for a dinner party, had a terrible falling out in the process, ended up scuffling bitterly on the vine-encrusted terrace, and all wound up worse off as a result.

There are some engaging moments on this album, but these are generally restricted to the more restrained passages of play, as in the verse structure of “The Greater Than Symbol and the Hash”, the jaunty melodies of “Black Wax” and “Some Dresses”, or the layered guitar work in “Pink Sabbath.” When they focus on melody and texture, the squashed Ghostbuster actually have some presence. But much of the time the sound is so bombastic, overblown, derivative and predictable it’s kind of hard to tell the songs apart. And raking the strings across the headstock only sounds “edgy” the first dozen times or so on the album.

The main problem is that this kind of dance-rock sound has become so ubiquitous, it’s kind of hard to even “hear” it any more. It just passes one by, like music in an elevator or hotel lobby. Which would be fine, if one were trying to make muzak. Not to say this isn’t an album people won’t enjoy, and that there aren’t some enjoyable moments on it. It’s just that as a whole the album seems to imply a slightly lobotomised listener, and panders to a certain contemporary dance-rock philistinism. Apologies to Mr Aykroyd.