SONG: "Porcupine or Pineapple?" - Brakes (The Beatific Visions, 2006)

I’ve got to give props to this track, which crept up on me the other week to deliver the musical equivalent of a brisk drubbing.


Like Maynard Keenan’s Tool offshoot A Perfect Circle, Brakes are a side-project whose work stands equal to that of any of its constituent parts. Comprising various members of UK indie stalwarts British Sea Power, The Tenderfoot and Electric Soft Parade, the quartet marry the latter’s melodic sensibilities to BSP’s barking eccentricity. Best-known for the indie dancefloor stomper All-Night Disco Party, their recent LP The Beatific Visions was named Album of the Year by 6Music and XFM despite slipping by virtually unnoticed. The band has an eclectic, anything-goes approach that makes them impossible to wrestle down from track-to-track - if the LP’s title song sounds like a homage to summery 60s popstrels The Apples in Stereo, Spring Chicken is a classic rock’n’roll barnstormer in the mould of Eddie Cochran and The Cramps. Equally, for every driving thump-along like Cease and Desist there’s a disarmingly gentle hymn lurking just round the corner: check out touching album-closer No Return, which uses the image of riffling through old blues records in a Birmingham thrift-store as a poignant metaphor for a failed relationship.


In keeping with the general air of stylistic irreverence, this appropriately spiky effort sounds like absolutely nothing else on the album. A deranged, minute-long blast of throwaway nonsense, it comes across like Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster molesting an Arctic Monkeys number while sloshed on Sunny Delight. With a structure apparently lifted straight out of Folk Implosion’s Daddy Never Understood, the rhythm section rattles along with a total disregard for public safety while vocalist Eamon Hamilton yelps out the question on everyone’s lips: “Porcupine or pineapple? / …Who won the war?! / Who won the war?! / Who won the war, and was it worth fighting for?!”


One of the most utterly pointless songs ever penned (as Hamilton later pertinently ponders, “Who won the war, and what the fuck was it for?!”), I’ll bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in yours that the idea for this song arose from a drunken Celebrity Deathmatch-style conundrum on the tour bus one evening. Either that or their thinking’s naturally this skewed - I wouldn’t put it past them. From the sound of things, they’re absolutely fucking nuts.