Canadian quartet New Fries released their mini-album More earlier this week on Telephone Explosion, the outcome of their time spent in an artist-run performance space & gallery in Toronto in which they recorded whilst also building an installation and creating visual art based on David Fair’s I Taught Myself To Play Guitar.
Having its inception in such a creative maelstrom, you might expect lead track ‘Mary Poppins’ Pockets’ to be a mish-mash of all manner of musical ingredients, and with its zig-zagging lead riff, stuttering bass, echoing synth and rambling semi-spoken lyric it doesn’t disappoint, hanging together by the thinnest of threads but hanging together nonetheless, its seemingly inevitable collapse making the whole affair that little bit more exhilarating. It’s matched by a potentially seizure inducing video of found footage pasted across a garish backdrop of bright greens and yellows that attempts to use the disparate fragments to tell the story of a pair of elderly diner owners facing up to a malevolent property developer.