MULES - ILLUSIONS OF JOY

 

The high rise block depicted on the cover of Mules’ new EP Illusions of Joy could be the apex of Brutalist excess. Situated in monochromatic parkland, this hexagonal example of ‘high’ modernism seems to be sitting on a rotational base like a playground carousel. The curtains that cover its front-facing side accentuate an oppressive infantilisation; they could be on the verge of parting to reveal a puppet show of multiple domestic discontents. Is this structure really a bin photographed at a severe angle to look like a towering public housing edifice and whose steel grid design only resembles myriad balcony windows? Either way, this Photoshopped illusion serves well as symbolic counterpoint to singer Tommy Vincent’s lyrical concerns: hegemony, social control, technological addiction, the neoliberal race to the bottom (which, in Vincent’s wordplay, ends in a tie).

 

The stark image also offers the opposing paradigm to Constant Nieuwenhuys’ concept of ‘New Babylon’ which Vincent references in the opening track ‘Ergonomic Living’. Inspired by the nomadic lifestyle of Roma itinerants the Dutch artist encountered in Italy in the 1950s, Nieuwenhuys conceived New Babylon as an anti-capitalist city which would promote a mobile and interconnected way of life – one that would encourage a childlike sense of play and discovery rather than being primarily focused on the maximum extraction of productivity. It’s a project that would prove inspirational for the Situationists and social theorist Henri Lefebvre. Vincent holds up New Babylon as an ecstatic fantasy made unattainable within our controlled lives. This utopian yearning could be better matched by his band with music suitably lively and exploratory enough for Homo Ludens, the imagined inhabitants of Nieuwenhuys’ drift city.

 

The Brighton based Mules create competent post-punk tunes that will appeal to many fans of the genre; some, however, will wish for some variance from the boilerplate elements that have set in like so much Brutalist concrete since the revival of the 2000s. Most egregious is a preponderance of emo-screamo vocalisations in the harder rocking choruses. Standard post-punk tropes – angular guitars; dynamic variations between clean/distorted, soft/loud; vital and insistent drumming – are all deployed adequately, especially in ‘I Think We Need to Talk’ and closer ‘Motor Oil’. The most successful songs like the dub reggae-ish ‘Lonely, Bored and High’ don’t stray too far from simple observance of everyday life for the single and unemployed. More ambitious numbers like ‘Things We Read in Books’ reduce significant concepts from 20th century postmodern thought to random, disconnected academic signifiers. A line like “Plato’s fucking cave” may raise a dry chuckle for the cognoscenti; it does little to illuminate the metaphor’s relevance in the discernment of boundaries separating reality and simulation. Nor does it add much to Vincent’s apparent message of how lofty philosophical ideas do little to prepare us for real life stress and disappointment. There are vital connections and insights to be illuminated here, but Vincent’s dry, sarcastic delivery and clipped lines merely serve to satisfy stylistic codes inherited from Sleaford Mods, LCD Soundsystem and The Fall. A galvanic spark is necessary to lift the four-piece into a creative space where they can provide a more inspirational soundtrack for Vincent’s compelling thematic motivations. Given Mules’ stated influences – Parquet Courts, Metz, Gilla Band – there seems to be a disparate subconscious blend of elements in place sufficient to inspire something more exciting.

 

New Babylon’s network of interconnecting sectors, its airy atria and improvisatory ladders, provides abundant metaphors for music’s evolutionary routes and intersectional epiphanies. Post-punk is a suitably New Babylonian musical architecture, being an umbrella term for a wide range of practices and attitudes: the accessibility of DIY production; erasure of divisions between high and low art; the use of musical form as a vehicle for political critique; an eclecticism in embracing experimental approaches that both predate and follow punk rather than falling in line with punk’s 1976-as-Year Zero orthodoxy. The 2000s revival has created its own orthodoxy. It has also inspired sounds as diverse as the 60s garage rock simplicity of Eddy Current Suppression Ring, the martial psych beats of Viet Cong/Preoccupations, the noirish, nocturnal tints of Fontaines DC, and the radical effects-arsenal-processed, no wave-inspired noise pop of Gilla Band’s recent release Most Normal. Mules deserve their own place in this heritage, but if they are to achieve more than complete a post-punk box ticking exercise that can only end in a tie, they need to inject more anarchist praxis in their music making.

Mules Illusions of Joy is out now through Halfmeltedbrain Records and available on Bandcamp:

https://mulesband.bandcamp.com/album/illusions-of-joy

Text: (C) Copyright 2023 by Jon Kromka