EP Review :: La Bête Blooms - I Know It’s Nothing

EP

La Bête Blooms

I Know It’s Nothing

April 14 2017 (Warren Records/Adult Teeth Recording Company)

8.5/10

Words: Richard O’Hagan

Ah, Hull. Home of the nation’s sweariest and most miserable poet, Philip Larkin. Home of The Housemartins and The Beautiful South. Home of… well, not much else, if local lads La Bête Blooms are to be believed.

‘I Know It’s Nothing’, the five-piece’s second EP, is essentially twelve minutes of teenage angst and grumbling, Daniel Mawer’s angry, exhausted and sometimes distorted vocal growling over a demonic witches’ brew of sound. From the moment the buzzsaw riff that opens ‘Breaking In’ kicks off, to the dying notes of Hives-y closer ‘What You Want’, this is a journey in sound, an acoustic rabbit hole which also brings you the choppy ‘Hole In My Head’ and the curious charm of lead track ‘Low Hummer’.

On one take, La Bête Blooms aren’t really doing anything new here: there are elements of the likes of My Bloody Valentine and A Place To Bury Strangers all over this record. What the band have done so very well, though, is to take all of those various influences and add their own touches; a process helped, no doubt, by having Matt Peel, sometime producer of the likes of Pulled Apart By Horses and Eagulls, at the controls. It means that they don’t fall into the trap that so many young bands of this genre do, of turning out song after song that are practically indistinguishable from one another.

During the chorus of the anxiety and low esteem-ridden ‘Low Hummer', Mawer repeatedly tells us, "You know I’m a mess". He might well be, but this excellent record certainly isn’t.