AMNESTY WEEK BEGINS NOW! First, every year, one of our writers chooses a deliberately controversial track. This is not that track, and yet…

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[6.14]

W.B. Swygart: Every individual element of DLAM(IDLI) has been recorded too loudly and is fuzzing around the edges. I am unconvinced that the drummer is holding his sticks the right way round. The song is drunk. Holly Ross Out Of Angelica is wandering around a town that is about the same size as her, possibly smaller. She has cultivated a system at the off-licence that enables her to figure out which Polish lager will get her most pissed for £5. The video proudly trumpets the involvement of John Shuttleworth. I can see the cast of Thunderbirds all dancing to it in unison, flapping up and down with their arms everywhere. It’s wantonly feckless nihilism I can believe in and a physical manifestation of why I don’t want to talk to anyone on the Internet about music anymore, cos there’s a voice in my head that is calling me weak for liking this, like it’s a symbol of regression or something. I get needled by the fact that there’s thousands of songs by thousands of bands like this that I can’t stand; I hear a billion reasons why not, but there’s an unstoppable fireball blazing in the middle of it all reminding me that I’ve spent enough of the past decade talking myself out of doing anything, and this just might be the time to JUMP UP AND DOWN SCREAMING MY FUCKING LUNGS OUT.
[10]

Kat Stevens: I do not recommend listening to this when hungover. 
[4]

Iain Mew: The last time I had this strong a visceral reaction of irritation the first time I heard a song, it was to Art Brut’s “Formed A Band.” I ended up really liking them, so I might regret this mark. The Lovely Eggs even sound a bit like Art Brut, and there are a couple of impressive stop-turnaround-start moments. For now, though, they might as well be singing “I’VE GOT A SONG THAT WILL GET ON YOUR NERVES.”
[1]

Katherine St Asaph: Lead vocalist Holly Ross sounds uncannily like Fight Like Apes’ MayKay if she embraced guitars and were five — which isn’t meant as condescending, given that the lyrics include “LOOK AT HIM, LOOK AT HIM, LOOK AT HIM, LOOKIT!” She sounds like Carolyn from How I Survived Being A Girl if she ended the book still scrambling up roofs to spy on neighbors called Freeko and Fattabutta and became really British. If those comparisons meant nothing to you, because they did, she sounds like Mary Lennox after a bulk crate of Pixy Stix and too many talking-tos, shouting things that’d be offensive (“cul-de-sac arse,” “dog-turd eyes”) if they weren’t discredited by being so book-of-insults ridiculous. You will hate this, but it’s the best part. The Lovely Eggs have never written and will never write another song this good, but not since “Jake Summers” have I wanted to scream along so bad.
[9]

Jonathan Bradley: I don’t much like children, and I don’t much like this song for the same reason. At least four-year-olds have the excuse that they’re not fully developed mentally. The Lovely Eggs, who are presumably adults, waste my time tunelessly shouting pointless things about unpleasant people, and they can’t even properly make a pleasant racket while they do it. This track does nothing, and there’s no reason for it to exist.
[2]

Edward Okulicz: The voice was such an immediate turnoff that I nearly didn’t notice how endearing the cheerily abrasive guitars were. Subsequent listens to further take in those charms then had me appreciating the fierce shouting. Maybe even liking it? Then “look at ‘im, look at ‘im” wore down my resistance completely. This defies any description I can come up with other than, forgive me, reader… a shouty Brit indie version of “The Court of King Caractacus.”
[6]

Sally O’Rourke: First listen: oh, it’s the Half Man Half Biscuit parody no one knew was possible. Then the song started nagging at my brain more than any other Amnesty Week entry. I fell for its whimsy: Holly Ross’s exaggerated Lancashire accent and just-shy-of-the-note singing; the music’s handmade Buzzcocks dynamism; the loopy invented insults for people so ridiculous that the standard putdowns wouldn’t do them justice. Like an ugly dog or a neverending knock-knock joke, “Don’t Look at Me (I Don’t Like It)” is so off-putting that it cycles around to becoming charming.
[8]

Alfred Soto: I’m a sucker for parenthetical subtitles, direct expression, and guitars. But archness masquerading as direct expression angers me. No, don’t look at them, please.
[3]

Alex Ostroff: The lyrics are delightfully odd — wheelchair hearts, dressing-gown noses and so forth — but something’s missing. Even at its most exuberant, the shouting feels a bit too blasé to really commit to the ludicrousness of the material. Fight Like Apes or Gareth Campesinos! circa Hold On Now, Youngster… would dive right in, unafraid of seeming ridiculous, but the vocal take here sounds as affected as Lily Allen’s mockney.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: She has an appealingly snotty yelp, and if I’m not sure whether the increasingly outlandish insults — washing-line smile, sausage-roll thumb — are meant to carry more information than sheer comedy, that’s probably down to cultural difference.
[7]

Jer Fairall: The chorus hook is so brash and petulant that it heroically rescues bratty punk-pop from an entire sorry decade of Avril Lavignes, but the real genius is in how each verse builds upon the increasingly absurd payoffs of the previous ones, like some wacky children’s word game based on creative one-upmanship. “Turn this shit ’round ’cause we wanna go home” lets us know, with abrupt insistence, right when playtime is over.
[9]

Zach Lyon: Good clean pop punk, and I don’t mean pop-punk, but the accessible genre of once-dirty punk you see dripping through a brand new Brita filter of pop. Ironically, it’s more discordant this way; punk sounds strange when it seems to be intended for an Internet audience rather than a regional one.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Maybe it’s unfair, but the band name/song title combo scans like the work of Happy Flowers. Once inside, it sounds like a PG-rated Mclusky. One thing it does have in common with the work of Messrs. Anus and Horribly Charred Infant is that it sounds like vintage Peelbait: a punk tangential with an emphasis on fun and locality (chiefly those aitches, which aren’t dropped so much as flung down.) It’s aimed at that Venn intersection containing fans of arbitrary word pairings and enthusiasts of mid-tempo “Janie Jones” homages.
[5]

Josh Langhoff: Thorough! Rather, repetitive in a way that implies thoroughness. Not repetitive in a way that doesn’t imply thoroughness. Not nonrepetitive in a way that implies or doesn’t imply thoroughness or unthoroughness. Not unthorough in a way that doesn’t invite repetition. Not thorough in a way that does or doesn’t invite repetition or nonrepetition — I mean, it’s just not thorough! For instance, there’s no man with a Christmas tree nose, who I actually saw yesterday — AND HE WAS SHOPPING FOR CHRISTMAS TREES.
[8]