Champion Kickboxer – ‘Perforations’ (The SPC) Released – 05/06/06

What in the **** is going on in Sheffield? Home to Human League, to Pulp, to Cabaret Voltaire for ****s sake. Cabaret Voltaire, the sky scraping Burroughsian sound engineers - the electronic apocalypse light years ahead of their peers. Now what do we have - the Brass Monkeys and this lot, these sods who’ve come to ruin our peaceful Wednesday evening.

Champion Kickboxer sound like the worlds laziest Oi band dipping their feet in avant-garde. Which is not very avant garde but very bloody crap. Everybody sings in the same doleful baleful way and its just one of those ****ing irritating things whereby bands think that by relinquishing melody and structure will elevate them to experimental status. Excremental maybe. It just sounds shit.

The backing vocals on ‘Get On Up’ (is that title a joke?) are just so bad they verge on being medieval - we can see them now, drinking mead on the common. Actually, there is a real squat feel to this but not in any decent kind of way. Each song just pulls you down with its dreadful lethargic non-energy, like a vortex sucking the fun out of life. One song is called ‘Exhaustion Rules’ which exactly describes our condition after trawling through this mess.

We have guitar, bass, drums and keys but we couldn’t really begin to tell you what they sound like. Fragmented sloooow indie we guess. We're sure they’re all really lovely people but this is like being locked in a dark hole with Giles Brandreth with a crack habit.

Another song is called ‘Like Him+Her+Her+Me’ but all we can think of is the Chuckle Brothers (to me, to you etc.). Obviously it doesn’t sound like that cos that would be good. And its time to stop now if comparisons with the Chuckle Brothers end up in their favour.

One to avoid then.