Glasgow’s propulsive, polymorphic post-punk’s, Humour, sit you down and tell you the tales of polar explorations and metamorphic nomads as they announce their second EP, ‘A Small Crowd Gathered To Watch Me’. Wetting their finger and flicking the page, Humour opens up chapter 3, ‘Big Money’, a story of 19th-century rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald. Sit back, surrender to their voice, and let them stir you with unease.
Guitars wrap around with a fidgety, nervous hum, dousing you in the sweltering humidities of the Madre de Dios. Ross Patrizio and Jack Lyall have a way of making each note echo with the lurkings of a sinister pursuer in this dense rainforest, while the pummeling rhythms of Ruairidh Smith’s drums and Lewis Doig’s bass become the tribal heartbeat beneath it all. The blood-curdling screams of Andreas Christodoulidis pierces with the wails of innocents, echoing the atrocities and destruction of oligarchs. Left behind the silent graves of worlds old and sacred.
A note from the author: Christodoulidis, entails that, ‘Big Money’ came from a “read about this Peruvian guy called Carlos Fitzcarrald. He desperately wanted to get to an area of the Amazon basin that was rich in rubber but inaccessible by boat, which is why it hadn’t yet been claimed during the rubber boom. He exploited a group of indigenous Amazonian people, forcing them, under the pain of death, to drag his steamboat in pieces over the mountain, which separated him from the prized area. I imagined him being a temperamental character with a lot to prove, prone to violent outbursts and drinking. I wanted to convey a sense of the destruction of the natural world and the traditions of an ancient people that materialised with the introduction of murder and disease to the Amazon by wealth-hungry interlopers.”
Humour are masters of dancing with tension and chaos. Their sound oozes with the discomfort that mirrors the harrowing narratives they conjure.
Photo by Marilena Vlachopoulou
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