"A new dawn is coming," a feedback-laced Paul Resende, lead singer of Ikara Colt,
snarls resignedly on "City of Glass" off his and his bandmates' debut album Chat and
Business, "All change in the city of glass." For a band that names at least one of their
songs ("Sink Venice") for a 1930s futurist manifesto, this is an almost expected sentiment.
This new dawn appears to be related to the neo-rock movement that made the pretty boys
of the Strokes and the Hives so very, very rich. Forget about Belle and Sebastian or
Badly Drawn Boy (the latter of which is very vocally hated by Ikara Colt), these art-
school punks shriek in your ear. Go back to those halcyon days when punk meant young
Iggy Pop beating himself physically and emotionally on stage, when Sid Vicious and
Nancy Spungen locked themselves inside the Chelsea Hotel, when heroin and rock went
hand in hand. That's the tradition Ikara Colt calls to mind, and they do a hell of a tribute
job on Chat and Business.
Most prominent among Ikara Colt's influences are Sonic Youth and Joy Division.
Couple that druggy, growling aesthetic with the vim and vigor of a Saturday night pub
fight, and you have some notion of what Ikara Colt sounds like. Speedy, volatile, spittle-
dripping, and, above all, filled with an energy unique to frustrated and bored college
students, the London-based foursome enjoy a pretty large (and angry!) following in
England. They've already become critics' darlings for their clever lyrics and
enthusiastically thrashing guitars and pounding drums. And Chat and Business
is, to a large extent, an exciting album. It's hard to deny the adrenaline rush of, say, the
heavily Sonic Youth-sounding "Rudd"; when Resende yells, "Short wave radio! Cheap
magazines!" accompanied by guitarist Claire Ingram's faded yelps, you kind of want to
run outside and tear down the billboards and posters for any musician who doesn't have
fiery vitriol coursing through their engorged veins. Then you remember that you've felt
that way before. Didn't Thurston Moore once make you want to break stuff, too?
My personal favorite song on the album, "City of Glass", lurches discordantly on the
shoulders of a bizarre melodica riff augmented by Resende's both gruff and boyish
vocals. It's a truly Joy Division moment when Resende reigns in his lung-busting to
create a strangely understated song (well, understated for punk, that is). You can almost
imagine him flailing about psychotically onstage like Ian Curtis. But "City of Glass"
isn't a rip-off; far from it. Resende sings, in this song, like someone who, instead of
hanging himself like Curtis, has stuck around longer and seen a lot more disappointment.
The new day that's dawning isn't a necessarily happy one, after all, no matter how
welcome it may be. While Ikara Colt is gagging for change, musically, politically, and
aesthetically, they also know how stagnant movements get. It's as though they see
beyond the revolution to its inevitable later failure.
And that's why there's really no better movement for comparison with Ikara Colt than
futurism, or other, eventually dead movements of the classic avant-garde. Indeed, Ikara
Colt beg to be compared to such anarchic artistic change; in "Sink Venice", they call for
the destruction of art galleries and cathedrals in the historic city, much as Marinetti and
his counterparts advocated a destruction of the artistic icons of the past. Ikara Colt very
deliberately place themselves in a different canon than the bands they will inevitably be
compared to: the Strokes, the White Stripes, the Vines, et al. Certainly, they deserve
more renown than the intensely overrated Casablancas and their ilk; these fuck-off rock
and roll kids have more smarts and attitude in a broken drumset than a thousand Strokes
albums. They know how short-lived they might be, and they're clever enough to propose
that that's exactly what they want. Movements or bands that go on for too long lose any
credibility they had to start with. That's why the enormous debt Ikara Colt owe to bands
like Sonic Youth and Joy Division can be so frustrating; in basing their music so much on
that of the past, aren't they, in some way, contradicting themselves?
Still, they're young, they're angry, and they're not going to take it anymore. All the
members of Ikara Colt are so damn good at what they do, it's not that difficult to forgive
their sometimes-adolescent, not quite fully formed politics. After all, feeling like you're
17 again can be a really, really good time. If you experience that with a smart band, as
opposed to the aforementioned bland supposed saviors of rock and roll, you might even
still respect yourself in the morning.
— 8 November 2002
