It’s a cliche that gets banded around too much as it is but Restless Taxis really are doing things their own way.
A DIY queer and POC band from the East London – the live four-piece (including a dedicated interpretative dancer), who are still firmly in their teens, are as used to lugging their own sound systems to house parties and DIY raves as they are your conventional pub or club venue – their first show took place two years ago under an Edgware Road Underpass, we’re told.
Citing influences as varied as Emo, Rave, Van Halen, A.R Kane, Dean Blunt and UK Sound system culture, infusing their Caribbean heritage too into a sound they call ‘Post-Yardie’, new single ‘Slugs’, for anyone not yet acquainted with the group, is a complete and persuasive introduction.
A lo-fi, 80s-leaning shoegaze noise-fuck that borders on the psychedelic voyages of space-rock, ‘Slugs’ delivers an impossibly beautiful yet bulldozing attack of time-defying expression. Raucous and emotionally raw, it’s completely and totally absorbing, existing in a world where seconds and minutes are meaningless phenomena, and all physical perceptions are puppeted by the push of a pedal or the distant call of vocal; by the rush of cymbals, the switch of a chord or the turn of a chorus.
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