Album Review: Bis - "Systems Music For Home Defence"


So I'll be honest, it wasn't until we did a Sounds From The Junkshop column on them a year or so ago that I realised that Bis were still even active but apparently this is their third album since firing up the old Teen-C machine again a decade or so ago. The thing is, Bis were a group who went through so many different styles of music from bratty DIY punk to sleek electro-Britpop to spooked out lo-fi so guessing where this effort would fit into their sound felt a bit like throwing a dart into a board.

As it turns out though, Systems Music For Home Defence could almost be the missing link between Bis' first two albums, mixing the bouncy punk of their debut New Transistor Heroes with the more studied pop approach of its follow-up Social Dancing. Opener Lucky Night sets the tone well with its defiant message against creeps who try to schmooze up to women in nightclubs by pretending to be sensitive "new men" being backed by the sort of poppy enthusiasm that informed Bis' best early stuff mixed with  some of the more immediately tuneful songwriting that gave us tunes like Eurodisco and Action And Drama. It's almost as if the band have done a Frankenstein style assembly job using all their best bits and Headaches ups the ante formula with its irresistible "Bang bang, won't stop" refrain.

Ultimately, Systems Music... is the sound of a band having fun - I Don't Think We're Falling In Love brings back the brash confidence of prime time Duran Duran and (I Got My) Independence is one part Daphne & Celeste style cheekiness and one part early '90s dance rhythms with a message of defiance underneath. Elsewhere, although We Do Structures seems to be a humorous song title, it's got a more angular sound to it which actually works pretty well, similarly the MeToo style anger of You're Drunk Go Home. The quite lovely and sparse The Lookback meanwhile sees Bis revisiting the more stripped-down sound of their later albums like Return To Zero.

Although it doesn't quite hit the target every time, this album is at least proof that the Bis of 2022 still have plenty of energy, an ear for a good hook and something relevant to say. And that's more than enough to justify them still being around in this writer's opinion.


NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sounds From The Junkshop #18 - Heavy Stereo

Image
  "So here's to a happy landing, wherever we're fallin' to..."  - Heavy Stereo  - Cartoon Moon , 1996 Let's be honest, it all started to go wrong for Oasis when they started to swallow the "new Beatles" hype wholesale. Well that and when they started developing a worrying predilection for tedious blues jams but that's a whole other story. I blame Paul Weller meself. The thing about Definitely Maybe was, y'see, yes there was definitely a Beatles influence there (I mean on the likes of Live Forever and Up In The Sky you can't really miss it) but there was so much more going on there as well. On that one, the Gallaghers owed arguably more to the '70s glam stomp of T-Rex and Slade ( Cigarettes and Alcohol for the former, Rock 'n' Roll Star for the latter) or the scuzzy sneer of the Pistols ( Bring It On Down ) than they did to the Fab Four. Their critics may have derided them as such but a Lennon & McCartney tribute band ...
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure, ...
Read more

Sounds From The Junkshop #46 - Bis

Image
  "If it's not worth pretending then I don't wanna know..."  - Bis   - Eurodisco There's an argument that we should possibly have covered Bis a bit earlier in SFTJ some time around the entries for 1996 or so rather than now as we enter 1999 as this was when they had their biggest success and their five minutes of infamy. Bursting on the scene just as Britpop was at its peak, their none more lo-fi aesthetic which harked back to a decade before brought them plaudits and derision in pretty much equal amounts. I remember my younger sister absolutely loved them and I ended up borrowing her copy of the group's debut album New Transistor Heroes  mainly just to see what the fuss was about. Although it wasn't deserving of some of the scathing reviews it got, I thought it was good but not brilliant. Certainly Bis were very much a Marmite band with the keyboard bleeps, wannabe-cutesy lyrics about sweetshops etc and screechy vocals putting a lot of people off but in a...
Read more