PLEASE NOTE: THIS SHOW IS NEXT DOOR AT RESCUE ROOMS
Genre: Indie
Hometown: Madrid
About:
It’s such a shame that Phil Spector’s last production job was Starsailor. That’s a bit like … hold on, there isn’t a more apt example of bathos in pop history than Phil Spector ending his producing career not with a bang from his Wall of Sound’s timpani but with the whimper of James Walsh (unless you count George Martin producing Midge Ure or Trevor Horn doing Robbie). Deers would have been a more fitting final blowout. Only formed last year, they’re a duo – Ana Garcia Perrote and Carlotta Cosials – who expand to a four-piece for gigs, like the one they did this week when they appeared (or rather “ruffled the spirits of everyone”) at Corsica Studios in London and charmed the attendees with their pidgin English and fidgety Spanish version of lo-fi garage rock with hints of 60s girl-group pop.
You can hear their amateurishly enthusiastic take on the classics on their single Barn, which follows their summer debut single, Demo. Everything they do sounds like a demo, which for some will be the whole point. Barn was recorded in Berlin – funny, because apparently they record using their mobile phones, so they could have done it anywhere. None of that city’s legendary atmospheres – the ruined grandeur of Bowie by the Wall, the shiny pummel of Tresor – has remotely affected what Deers do. It’s as rickety as if it had been made in a cupboard in Madrid.
The first CD Perrote and Cosials listened to was Room on Fire, which makes sense: they sound like kids bashing away at the Strokes’ back catalogue with more passion than finesse. Lead track Bamboo moves at the pace of the Velvets in morphine blues mode. Lou Reed would have loved it. Mike Read wouldn’t. It’s one of those rock ballads that sounds more seedy than weepy. It has an edge, an undertone. It twangs with tinny, trebly tremolo as the ladies complain about their geeky boyfriend poring – as geeky boyfriends tend to do, even in Spain – over their precious C86 collection. “I need you to feel like a man when I give you all I am,” they sing (term used advisedly for vocals that approximate Veruca Salt – the spoiled brat, not the band – doing an impression of Nico doing an impression of Ronnie Spector). “I know you’re not hungover today, you are classifying your cassettes.” Castigadas en el Granero translates as “Punished in the Barn” – one imagines they weren’t baling hay in there. This one is faster, more Roadrunner than Pale Blue Eyes, all chugging repetition, because that’s how to build intensity and that’s what rock’n’roll does. Trippy Gum revisits the squalid splendour of Dion/Spector’s Born to Be with You, only lacking the grandiose production, although there are intimations of epicness: with time, and money, they could go that way. There is also an extended fuzzy guitar solo that appears to have been played by someone wearing gloves. Finally, Holograma, a cover of a track by Los Nastys, is 80 seconds short, acoustic, raw, simple, crude – all the stuff that gives rock critics the bends.
