This is a cross-post from my Sound Club music club, where I regularly share an album for listening and discussion. Check out the club here.
The mid-00s UK rock scene had become a relatively safe space. The rise of the Strokes and The White Stripes in the US had their own response on the other side of the Atlantic, but it had ultimately culminated in the concept of ‘landfill indie’. Kaiser Chiefs, Keane, and The Zutons knocked out rock songs with little new to say, and the likes of the Libertines were churning out a kind of garage punk that seemed more about the associated press narrative than the music.
Onto that canvas arrived Test Icicles — a group that are almost certainly more influential than they are good. The band rejected much of the mod-ish stylings of their peers, and embraced something more unpredictable — a kind of youthful, unpredictable exuberance. Neon, aggressive, and a little rave. Where the Libertines embraced poeticism and literary references, Test Icicles were pulling from speed metal, thrash, rave, and hip-hop.
Test Icicles seemed destined to implode from the beginning, and whilst their demise wasn’t actually that spectacular, they were short-lived. They produced just one album, and subsequently decided they didn’t actually like their music very much, before going their separate ways. Still, I have long argued their influence lasted much longer. British rock was about to change, and For Screening Purposes Only represented a kind of proto-blueprint.
Opening with Your Biggest Mistake, Test Icicles are cranked to 11 from the get-go. Angular guitars, distorted vocals, screams, synth stabs and a stop-start rhythms all come together to make a kind of thrash-punk that referenced predecessors, yet felt distinctly modern. It has a kind of bubble-gum throwaway feel to it, yet it is also remarkably inventive.
Singles Boa Vs. Python and Circle. Square. Triangle appear in sequence, like they are in some sort of face off. The former, with its kind of early internet topic referencing title, is a garage punk song that winds itself up before getting to a point where it feels like the band just can’t hold the riff in any more. Vocals and guitars spool out like spring-loaded snakes flying out of a can. The presumably PlayStation-referencing Circle. Square. Triangle is the closest the band ever came to a bona fide hit — steely guitar riffs soar as Sam Mehran’s vocals arc. The band frequently shift from harmonies to squeals and back, like a 17-year-old kid crunching the gears in a Ford Escort on the motorway, accidentally slamming it into second rather than forth and hearing the engine scream. It’s a thrilling piece, and has a video that may well be the most mid-00s thing I’ve ever seen.
Elsewhere, things are even more experimental. Catch It! is ridiculous — grime, low-end bass and compressed vocals all converging on some sort of musical black hole, like genres converging on an event horizon.
The final single on the album, What’s Your Damage? is the musical equivalent of putting metal in the microwave and turning it on just to see what happens. Pressure builds, with no obvious release valve. Once again the band crash from melody to distortion with aplomb. All You Need Is Blood is possibly the most mainstream things get, vocals actually converging on one another, at least between the now obligatory screams. Dancing On Pegs bounces on a booming drum beat, before the album closes on the (TMNT referencing? Probably) Party On Dudes (Get Hype!) and a cacophony of a ghost track called What’s Michelle Like. The latter is likely not even a listen-once-kind-of-thing.
Beyond the time capsule confines of the album itself were a clutch of remixes. What’s Your Damage? saw a pretty mental remix from Alan Braxe and Fred Falke, a young James Ford did something a little more balanced with Circle. Square. Triangle, whilst Boa Vs. Python was translated into a grime track by Lethal Bizzle, amongst others. Digitalism and Spank Rock also turned in remixes. The diversity of artists and styles say something about where Test Icicles were operating — and it was very much across conventional genre lines, their fans not genre fans, but there for the vibe. I suspect all of those artists took as much from Test Icicles as they gave here. Not bad for a bunch of kids.
It’s what happened next that really matters, though. The UK suddenly became enamoured with one of the last proper mainstream “scenes” we ever got … the Klaxons arrived; packaging similar ideas as Test Icicles into a slightly less chaotic package, and suddenly neon was everywhere. We were in a beautifully weird punk-dance-metal crossover moment: nu rave was born. More on that with a future album, of course, but ultimately neither the Klaxons nor the scene they operated within lasted.
Our story has a coda, however, as out of the ashes of Test Icicles rose one of Britain’s most inventive musicians — Devonté Hynes. With a career that went on to see production credits with Solange, Haim and Carly Rae Jepsen, as well as collaborations with Caroline Polachek, A$AP Rocky, and (ahem) P Diddy, he has quietly touched many corners of music. More on him in due course too.
The mid-00s UK rock scene had become a relatively safe space. The rise of the Strokes and The White Stripes in the US had their own response on the other side of the Atlantic, but it had ultimately culminated in the concept of ‘landfill indie’. Kaiser Chiefs, Keane, and The Zutons knocked out rock songs with little new to say, and the likes of the Libertines were churning out a kind of garage punk that seemed more about the associated press narrative than the music.
Onto that canvas arrived Test Icicles — a group that are almost certainly more influential than they are good. The band rejected much of the mod-ish stylings of their peers, and embraced something more unpredictable — a kind of youthful, unpredictable exuberance. Neon, aggressive, and a little rave. Where the Libertines embraced poeticism and literary references, Test Icicles were pulling from speed metal, thrash, rave, and hip-hop.
Test Icicles seemed destined to implode from the beginning, and whilst their demise wasn’t actually that spectacular, they were short-lived. They produced just one album, and subsequently decided they didn’t actually like their music very much, before going their separate ways. Still, I have long argued their influence lasted much longer. British rock was about to change, and For Screening Purposes Only represented a kind of proto-blueprint.
Opening with Your Biggest Mistake, Test Icicles are cranked to 11 from the get-go. Angular guitars, distorted vocals, screams, synth stabs and a stop-start rhythms all come together to make a kind of thrash-punk that referenced predecessors, yet felt distinctly modern. It has a kind of bubble-gum throwaway feel to it, yet it is also remarkably inventive.
Singles Boa Vs. Python and Circle. Square. Triangle appear in sequence, like they are in some sort of face off. The former, with its kind of early internet topic referencing title, is a garage punk song that winds itself up before getting to a point where it feels like the band just can’t hold the riff in any more. Vocals and guitars spool out like spring-loaded snakes flying out of a can. The presumably PlayStation-referencing Circle. Square. Triangle is the closest the band ever came to a bona fide hit — steely guitar riffs soar as Sam Mehran’s vocals arc. The band frequently shift from harmonies to squeals and back, like a 17-year-old kid crunching the gears in a Ford Escort on the motorway, accidentally slamming it into second rather than forth and hearing the engine scream. It’s a thrilling piece, and has a video that may well be the most mid-00s thing I’ve ever seen.
Elsewhere, things are even more experimental. Catch It! is ridiculous — grime, low-end bass and compressed vocals all converging on some sort of musical black hole, like genres converging on an event horizon.
The final single on the album, What’s Your Damage? is the musical equivalent of putting metal in the microwave and turning it on just to see what happens. Pressure builds, with no obvious release valve. Once again the band crash from melody to distortion with aplomb. All You Need Is Blood is possibly the most mainstream things get, vocals actually converging on one another, at least between the now obligatory screams. Dancing On Pegs bounces on a booming drum beat, before the album closes on the (TMNT referencing? Probably) Party On Dudes (Get Hype!) and a cacophony of a ghost track called What’s Michelle Like. The latter is likely not even a listen-once-kind-of-thing.
Beyond the time capsule confines of the album itself were a clutch of remixes. What’s Your Damage? saw a pretty mental remix from Alan Braxe and Fred Falke, a young James Ford did something a little more balanced with Circle. Square. Triangle, whilst Boa Vs. Python was translated into a grime track by Lethal Bizzle, amongst others. Digitalism and Spank Rock also turned in remixes. The diversity of artists and styles say something about where Test Icicles were operating — and it was very much across conventional genre lines, their fans not genre fans, but there for the vibe. I suspect all of those artists took as much from Test Icicles as they gave here. Not bad for a bunch of kids.
It’s what happened next that really matters, though. The UK suddenly became enamoured with one of the last proper mainstream “scenes” we ever got … the Klaxons arrived; packaging similar ideas as Test Icicles into a slightly less chaotic package, and suddenly neon was everywhere. We were in a beautifully weird punk-dance-metal crossover moment: nu rave was born. More on that with a future album, of course, but ultimately neither the Klaxons nor the scene they operated within lasted.
Our story has a coda, however, as out of the ashes of Test Icicles rose one of Britain’s most inventive musicians — Devonté Hynes. With a career that went on to see production credits with Solange, Haim and Carly Rae Jepsen, as well as collaborations with Caroline Polachek, A$AP Rocky, and (ahem) P Diddy, he has quietly touched many corners of music. More on him in due course too.
