The Beautiful New Born Children - 'Hey People' (Domino) Released 16/01/06

A breathless, adrenaline-fuelled, amphetamine-spiked burst of punk rock headache inducing noise with a fascination for the hypnotic rhythms of so-called Krautrock and the textures of pure noise: that's The Beautiful New Born Children (even if that sentence lasted longer than most of their songs). With the whole album clocking in at just under twenty three minutes its safe to say that The Beautiful Newborn Children are not fans of indulgence.

'Hey People' charges out of the blocks and collapses twenty two minutes later in a haze of feedback leaving the listener feeling exhausted and uplifted at the same time. Very little is known of the band, even their label claims to have never met them in person. In an age where posing often overrides music The Beautiful Newborn Children allow their songs to do the talking.

The music itself is a series of freewheeling, raucous and stylish blasts of punk rock. The pace is relentless and as a result it can be difficult to distinguish between one song and the next. One stand out track however is ‘Hey Heartbreaker’. Despite sounding exactly the same as everything else on the album the songs energetic and boisterous nature makes it sound like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs in a high speed car chase. The bands mysterious back story is as interesting as their album is minimal. They joined together all participating in the dreaded 'side project'. Bassist Kirsten was formerly in a band with the late River Phoenix whilst lead singer Michael Beckett is a member of Schneider TM.

The simplistic nature of the album is partly due to the fact that all of the instruments are played by band members previously used to other instruments. For example the drummer used to play guitar and picked up the sticks for the first time when recording this album. If you value the lyrical integrity then this album isn’t for you, half of the lines are indistinguishable and the other half are dumb statements like “I’m feeling good, I’m feeling fine, I’m OK and I don’t really give a **** what you say”.

Whilst the credibility of the lyrics could be questioned sometimes a simple “Woo Hoo” can provoke more emotion more than a thousand words. Overall this album isn’t going to change the world but it never intends to so it’s a resounding result for both band and listener.