Sales of ear defenders must have rocketed in Denmark lately, the noise-rock revolution sweeping the country is gaining momentum. Put simply, The Beardy Durfs are two "old men" who forge a lo-fi racket using a couple of guitars, a drum kit and a loads of other bits and bobs that they've found and managed to fix. Thankfully they've done a bloody awful job at fixing all these things and the result is a kind of mutilated noise-rock that sounds like it's been recorded once, then the tapes have all been scrunched up into a ball, kicked around the room to try and damage the living shit out of their instruments even more and then rerecorded over the original disfigured tape and handed in to the label who have dutifully put this lot out.
By the sounds of it they failed in their attempt to fix the microphone, so instead used the built-in mic on an old cassette recorded and shouted the lyrics at it down a broken megaphone. Also everything was carefully wired together incorrectly so as to generate maximum feedback. Times New Viking, you are now obsolete. And you can forget lo-fi or even no-fi. The Beardy Durfs have created minus-fi and it sounds brilliant as long as you don't have eardrums that you plan on keeping in working order for the rest of your life. It's all about living in the moment right? So no problems there. The other great aspect about The Beardy Durfs approach to making music is that, for the large, part they bypassed the need for any tunes. This would only get in the way.
'Fare Dodger' is a prime example of this, as are 'Safe Haven' and 'Low Fare Airlines'. When they do accidentally stumble upon a song it's so disfigured by the end of the recording process that it's hardly recognisable. Just look at 'Cables' or the potentially glittering indiepop of 'Redhead', a song so distant we might as well be hearing them play it from the moon. Despite this heroic effort some tunes do just about manifest themselves here, but that's OK because they're top stuff. 'Astral Vain', Harvey' and 'Lunch Box' possibly used to be a garage-rock songs, 'Bitcoins' is actually very pleasant and 'Televisionaries' is bit like a punk demo. 'A Ton Of Bricks' is the musical equivalent of a beat-up, paralytic tramp collapsing in a gutter and pissing himself. And it's pretty amazing.
The Beardy Durfs' website
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