On the basis of this debut album for Johnny Pictish Trail Lynch's Lost Map label, Idiot Savants might have been a better choice of name for the Glasgow-based collective formed around brothers George and Evan Thomas.
But Insect Heroes it is. Still, there's something extraordinarily odd and out-of-time about them and Apocalypso, an album that turns on scratchy guitars, wobbly, static-spitting synths, a plethora of musical styles and no small amount of humour. The best way I can describe them is to say they sound like a ghost band broadcasting a never-aired early 1980s Peel session from some parallel universe where The Beta Band are (rightly) revered as musical geniuses and The Jesus And Mary Chain have discovered wheezing keyboards, altered their sound accordingly and folded into it a sort of rockabilly-bossa nova hybrid. Which is to say Insect Heroes are steeped in much that's great and eccentric and bloody-minded about Scottish music, while at same time making of those influences something fresh and ear-boggling. In other words: turn on and tune in.
Barry Didcock
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