With a seemingly glib title like Ewok Sadness from the forthcoming album Oh My Sexy Lord you’d be forgiven for passing on this release but with this band nothing is quite as it seems.
Even the band’s name Marijuana Deathsquads leads you straight up the garden path.
I imagined some tongue in cheek black metal band but I was wrong. This band and this track are just so hard to pin down which is why they are so refreshingly good. Ewok Sadness is woefully sad, funny, ridiculous even but it’s also infectious, insightful, courageous and mind numbingly catchy. It takes you to a place you never even knew you wanted to go. All twisted hooks, distorted vocals and hissing electronic noise.
The video takes you on a trip into their world where we meet the Ewok of the title who is all messed up in the head as you can imagine he might be as the star of such a song. This is all about how our emotions and our self belief are pounded into submission by the modern clamour for fame and the commercialisation of our dreams sold back to us by our so called heroes. These heroes can never deliver as they are built of sand and just disintegrate when we try to grab hold of them.
This is brutal stuff. Trying to pigeon hole this band will turn your brain into guacamole. This isn’t that studied strangeness of an art school kind this is gut wrenching stuff from snarling believers who live on instinct. The album is out now apparently and I need to get hold of a copy to see if the rest of it matches up to this.
