ChopChop – Everything Looks So Real

Rosehill

Teetering between funk-pop, electro-ambience and performance poetry, ChopChop have long been one of Brighton’s most exciting live bands. With blistering riffs that dissolve in and out of polyrhythmic chaos, an intriguing array of instruments (conch shells, bagpipes, homemade samplers) and the lit-fuse stage presence of front-man Xelís de Toro, they were never going to make a boring album. The real question was always going to be just how far they could squeeze the glorious spontaneity of their live shows onto a recording.

The short answer “very well indeed” doesn’t quite do justice to what’s on offer here. Yes, all the live favourites sound great: openers “The Lark” and “Lifetime” are taut shards of poetic pop brilliance, and if you can keep the infectious ‘”To The Lighthouse” out of your head, please let me know how.

The frenetic urgency of the shows runs throughout: discordant trumpet stabs merge into Ennio Morricone-esque fanfares, tight-as-fuck homophonic arrangements disintegrating into spiralling guitar, simmering percussion and bass-lines worthy of Colin Greenwood. De Toro’s (largely) spoken-word delivery crackles with pathos and nervous energy as the band appear to totter at the edge of falling apart, like Charlie Chaplin‘s Little Tramp roller-skating backwards and blindfolded around a three-storey drop.

But like Chaplin, ChopChop are making something very difficult look simple, and its in this tacit mastery that the album exceeds expectations. Nothing seems accidental. Take the subtle instrumentation: flurries of bird-bright percussion that so deftly conjure “The Lark”, or the spine-tingling ASMR key-clacks that set the scene for the ambiguous “Building A House”. There are dozens of these delicate moments, the wailing alarm of siren-synth, scattered scales evoking the footsteps of playing children, minuscule flourishes that showcase the band’s creative sensitivity and mutual vision. There’s no grandstanding here, no one ego claiming centre stage.

This is particularly true of De Toro, who could have easily dominated, given his riveting live charisma. His voice is part and parcel of the band’s disjointed musical reality, moving between the heartfelt, the surreal, the quintessentially British (the John Donne quotation in “Lifetime” is mesmerising) before being subsumed by thundering drums into nightmare howls, words reduced to phonemes through repetition and disintegration. His persona is the perennial outsider, abandoned by his own bored shadow, constantly blown by the fates and mocked by the objects around him. The chromatic contempt of Strachan’s trumpet in “Not Luck” practically blows raspberries, à la early Betty Boop .

It’s this sense of both absurdity and tireless effort that stops the more sincere numbers from becoming evangelical; here is resistance in action, an attempt to comprehend an increasingly surreal landscape through ceaseless interrogation and shifting perspectives (even The Man With The Plan gets a compassionate nod). Language itself is chewed, gargled, and requisitioned for the use of those on the outside, English literary tropes are retold with Kafkaesque absurdity; Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse as Brexit metaphor, maybe. It’s a comment on boundaries, entitlement and migration, filled with buildings and birds in flight, yet never standing still long enough to claim the moral high ground. For all that, or perhaps because of it, Everything Looks So Real is an album of timely insight and tenderness.

The echoes of Talking Heads’ “Once In A Lifetime”, unlikely to be unintentional, is entirely apt. Here is a world of a curious fascination with everyday objects; there are roads leading nowhere and protagonists on the verge of psychosis, except these roads are littered with bunches of flowers, and houses are built brick by brick, not burned. What happens when CHOPCHOP reach the lighthouse is anyone’s guess, but they’re well on their way, roller-skating backwards and blind-folded.

-r dyer-