hungarian sounds on the rise

May 27th, 2008

Too often the Kunk boys are looking outside their own borders for shizz we wanna blog about — mostly stuff we play at our parties. And by ‘too often’, i mean, ‘all the time’. And by ‘outside their own borders’, i mean, ‘France’. But in all seriousness, there’s some local stuff of late that’s worth having a listen to — today that takes the shape of a young jockey with the moniker We Plants Are Happy Plants, and the Hungarian version of a noise pop supergroup, Hammer of Gods.

We Plants is off to an auspicious start, laying down attractive melodic lines across a variety of tracks. He doesn’t destroy the originals but gives them a subtle enjoyable punch… i expect in the coming months he’ll be finding his feet and turning it up a notch. He’s a member of the local Ektiv crew who are on top of all things fidgety and ravey ’round these parts — with my fave edit to date being dropped on the ubiquitous Frenchies Daft Punk, Superheroes.

Daft Punk - Superheroes (We Plants Are Happy Plants Remix) [zshare] // Daft Punk - Superheroes (We Plants Are Happy Plants Remix) [ysi]

And with that, Cigi I hand it over to you for some more local love…

Well, thank you, Brandon. Now it’s almost like podcast in writing. We should publish a book.

But before we do, let’s turn to Gods. Not for sacrifice or salvation but for a unique highlight of the basically non-existing Hungarian good-pop music-scene. First Audio Broadcast is the limited LP which was completed last year and self-releasing on concerts, etc, you know how it goes. It wouldn’t have to be like that, of course. If we had been in a better world it would’ve come out on Rough Trade or something. The supergroup involves Gergo from The Moog, Arpi from EZ Basic, Mezo and Andris. They self-declared themselves as “funeral folk” which is nice. Their influences include Syd Barrett, Guided By Voices and Sonic Youth. For me, this could be the Hungarian Arcade Fire. The sound is like a blend of noise, pop, distortion and experimenting punk-attitude. As for mood, every song has a blurry atmosphere of childish playfulness with older melancholic half-smiles, drunken pseudo-happiness, and some summer love. But the whole thing swims away with giant guitar-waves and heavy drums. The album was finished in winter but could be a perfect summer soundtrack.