Label: 2 Damn Loud
Year of Release: 1994
These days, when a consortium of critics and music industry insiders get together to name who the most important artists of the coming year will be, there's little danger involved. Trends are easy to predict. Does the band have 768,000 MySpace fans already? Have they just been signed for a lot of money by a cash-strapped major label who absolutely has to see a return on their investment? Are they Brit school graduates? With every year's announcements, you can almost hear the noise of check-boxes being ticked.
It wasn't always thus. In the nineties, predictions were likely to be very wonky indeed, which is how Blessed Ethel infamously got voted above Oasis as being the band most likely to succeed at the Manchester "In The City" live event. This isn't as unusual as it sounds. In the early nineties, suspicions in the music press were rife that Oasis were nothing more than a re-heated baggy band. Blessed Ethel, on the other hand, had vitriol and a sneering energy which sounded much more of the moment - elements of the still relatively topical Riot Grrrl movement were apparent, and much was made of the band's oddball outsiderness, an absolute virtue in those pre-Britpop days. The NME and Melody Maker wanted weird kids in the charts back then, not everyman styled stars.
We all know how the story ended. Blessed Ethel did not conquer the world, but "Rat" gives some clues as to how they might just have given the impression they could. It's ferocious garage rock with hysterical vocals; breathless, desperate and really rather brilliant in its own way. True, at the time this would have been no more or less original than Oasis' known output, but the full-throttle nature of the single showcases a band keen to leave a scalding great mark. Compare it back-to-back with an Oasis demo such as "Cigarettes and Alcohol", and everyone's favourite monobrowed pop stars suddenly sound less fierce, less full of themselves.
As for any musicians reading this who may have recently lost a "Battle of the Bands" contest... take heart. It means nothing.
3 comments:
Hmmm... I liked Blessed Ethel (I bought the 'Rat + Dog EP'), but never saw them live, unfortunately.
The great 'lost' indie band of that period though, has to be Salad who made lots of great records but never quite cracked it, while everyone else seemingly did.
Agreed there - although I covered Salad on this blog way back (though I think this is Blessed Ethel's second appearance, so there's no reason to not revisit that territory as well!)
Haha! I drew that rat! It was faxed to the label by their manager and they used it straight from the fax!
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