Multiple-Bank-Holiday-Madness: Summer daze with Dananananaykroyd (srsly)

It's like pop and punk, together! No, not pop-punk. Or punk-pop. It's fight pop, apparently.

I simply cannot believe that I like this record. Not just like, actively fucking love. I had to give a mark out 10 for L&Q but it's very difficult to do that at the best of times, and with the new Dananananaykroyd album, boringly titled There Is A Way, I ended up in all kinds of brain squiggles about it. I love it, but is it really "good"? I s'pose this is the problem that lies at the rotten heart of music criticism. A problem you learn to ignore.

Maybe because there's a certain amount of guilty pleasure in listening to an album so gleeful, so ridiculous, so summery - attributes I normally despise in music, especially from a chirpy guitar-wielding band who've opted for precision radio-friendliness on a record that's not gonna be on the radio much. I can't explain it! Except I love it! Most people would think that was perfectly okay. To my post-gradu-addled critical theory brain it's almost vertiginous.

But I promise you. If you think this is the sort of thing you don't like, you might be wrong. Go on, have a sniff. (Works best on about the fifth listen.)

First published in Loud And Quiet

Dananananaykroyd
There Is A Way
Out on Pizza College, 13th June

Likely the only “fight-pop Glasgow six-piece” in history, Dananananaykroyd roped in Slipknot producer Ross Robinson for knob-twiddling duties on their follow-up to 2009's Hey Everyone! – not an obvious choice, you'd think, but the breakneck thrashiness and razor-sharp clarity of these 11 tracks recall none other than hardcore squealers The Blood Brothers, another Robinson-produced band.

Dananananaykroyd carefully pair that heaviness with contagious melodies and arch lyricisms (“A spider's corpse is carried away by ants/Like voluntary coroners”) for a regionally-accented anti-pop much in the vein of Future of the Left. Stand-out tracks include 'Think and Feel', a ridiculous slice of accelerated punk funk with a dash of B-52s oddballsiness, immediately followed by super-bouncy would-be radio hit 'Muscle Memory'. Best consumed at full volume through knackered car door speakers, rampaging down to the seafront with the windows down: a total summer-gasm of a record.