Two things struck me while listening to Glasgow quartet The Wife Guys Of Reddit. One: this is quite possibly the greatest band name EVER. And two: I’ve never been so sure about anything than I am about this – John Peel would have LOVED The Wife Guys Of Reddit, and for very good reason.
Kicking off the new EP, ‘Wife Guys Diss Track‘ is rather like Guided By Voices have kidnapped a member of any early nineties shoegaze band and forced him to sing lead vocals while fellow abductee Graham Coxon makes shrieking noises on his guitar. It’s not actually Coxon, in case you wondered, but these weird and wonderful noises are reminiscent of the former Blur man’s punkiest solo moments and it all works delightfully.
‘Gloria In Excelsis Deo!‘ is almost like slacker reggae, yet steeped in sixties psychedelia, perhaps comparable in some ways to The Zombies or probably more accurately The Pretty Things, then ‘Dudes Rock‘ comes pounding in all frantic and full of energy, riffs aplenty, wild and free, a sense of paranoid energy in the vocals here. This is fucking loud, and utterly invigorating. Takes me back to my teenage years when, if something had pissed me off, I’d go and belt out ‘Debaser‘ or ‘Tame‘ from Doolittle and feel a whole lot better. This is like the covid generation’s version of that therapy.
‘Let Me Play A Serious One‘ is rather more restrained, at least initially, as it winds up bizarrely sounding like the outro of a classic Inspiral Carpets record.
‘Maximum Hand Size‘, conversely, has the same kind of feel as ‘Elizabeth My Dear‘ from the revered eponymous Stone Roses debut, albeit sounding rather more downbeat for the first half, like a gentle drug trip comedown, bafflingly then fading out with two and a half minutes of something akin to War‘s ‘Low Rider‘.
I don’t understand this record. Not one bit. But what I do know is that I bloody love it!
The Wife Guys Walk Into Oncoming Traffic | The Wife Guys of Reddit (bandcamp.com)
