Animals That Swim - Disc of the day

Animals That Swim
Workshy

(Elemental, 1994)

Trumpets, but no fanfares, in this unique fusion of indie jangle and (down)beat poetry.

A raggedy, throwback indie shambles in the shiny dawn of Britpop, Animals That Swim were the wrong band at the wrong time; they even had a heartbreaking song about a bitter, Elvis-era rock failure (Roy) that implied they had already foreseen and embraced their fate. Nothing else about this Outer London 5-piece suggested pretensions or expectations, certainly not the shruggy strums and melancholy trumpets of Workshy, while drummer/writer Hank Starrs’ half-spoken shaggy-dog songs would divine the magical in the everyday – turning streetside car windshield debris into the pieces of a chandelier – only to realise it wasn’t magical at all, just the same old shit, usually once the booze wore off (typical anticlimax: “well she died, of course”). Starrs’ actorly conviction makes every damn second believable and there are moments – the materialisation of alkies’ messiah King Beer in the song of that name or the technicolour chorus of Madame Yevonde – when melody bursts through the half-drawn curtains of Starrs’ world and the real and unreal dance with abandon. Starrs (real surname: Barker) now makes films, including a 2006 doc about Third Man director Carol Reed – fitting work for a born storyteller – but he’s not forgotten. Last year, Art Brut had him lay down a vintage monologue on their 2007 single, Direct Hit.

Danny Eccleston

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 22/04/2008