The Blips – Self Titled

Having gleaned from the accompanying PR that The Blips are some kind of ‘Alabama supergroup’, I quickly realised that I wasn’t familiar with any of the constituent parts, so instead of bluffing my way through with some shoddy and shallow internet research, I decided to take this record at face value and ignore its provenance. What I found was that The Blips are a delightfully quirky and idiosyncratic outfit that please themselves. And when I realised this, the fact that the band’s members hail from a raft of other bands, the record made sense. The Blips have absolutely nothing to prove. 

That being the case, there are absolutely no concessions to style or genre, just 10 joyously mad and self-indulgent slices of pop-punk with hints (gasp) of country rock that then veers wildly into angular post-punk. Same Do, for instance, slides from heavily chorused doomy bass into determinedly odd atonal guitar motifs over a driving The Cars on acid verse riff, only to flip the whole weird vibe into a jolly major chord singalong chorus. And that’s just one song.

If we take the stylistic self-indulgence as read, Wild Thing II, which rewrites The Troggs‘ original as an affectionate nostalgia trip, makes perfect sense. And then there’s the joyful nonsense that is Yes Yes No Yes Yes No, which defies comprehension but is the jolliest 1:41 you’ll hear this year, without exception.

To analyse each track individually, however, would be a pointless and thankless task. This album is an affectingly strange and vivid scrapbook, full of off-kilter sonics that morph seamlessly into glorious pop music. A kind of breezy easy listening for the lightly disturbed. A perfect soundtrack for perhaps the strangest of times from this punk-tinged Travelling Wilburys for now people. Oddly good, with the emphasis very firmly on ‘oddly’.

The Blips is out now on Cornelius Chapel Records and Bandcamp