The Singles Jukebox

We still blame Pat Shortt…

[Video][Myspace]
[7.00]

Iain Mew: This is my favourite amnesty pick that I hadn’t already heard. Funky in a loose, playful way, it nonetheless has a mysteriousness and undercurrent of threat to suit its title. “Here be monsters, go no further” drips with the suggestions of unknown but intriguing horrors. The song’s discordant climax of doom follows through.
[8]

Jer Fairall: Comes on with a limber post-punk twitch, a moody noir-ish piano refrain and a Scissor Sisters retro-sleaze guitar riff for the first minute, before the cooly evasive female vocal kicks in and points it in another, weirder still direction. Only during the final minute of barely controlled instrumental chaos does this reveal no real end destination in particular, like a tour guide leading us through the murky thicket of the kind of nightmare landscape that the monsters of the title would no doubt haunt.
[7]

Josh Langhoff: Repetition and space create a sense of highly controlled menace then break into stabbing smears of noise that fill and overflow their spaces. A fine navigator, Annie Tierney warns us exactly what’s about to happen and goes no further.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: I’ve lost track of how many people are in Tieranniesaur now (seven?), but some of them are: punsake Annie Tierney, initially part of girl group Chicks and later part of powerpop group Yeh Deadlies; Padraig O’Reilly, another part of Yeh Deadlies; and a wodge of people from Popical Island, an Irish collective who put out a few compilations with lots of bands whose names escaped me, which tends to happen when you spend 50+ hours a week writing about other music. Then Tieranniesaur popped up on non-Irish sites, which is remarkable for bands not acoustic and not called the Frames or Villagers, so I relistened, humbled. For some reason, all my comparisons for Annie’s voice here (and I do mean “here”; the album’s all over the place) are Swedish. She’s sometimes pugnacious like Cecilia Nordlund, sometimes sullen like Stina Nordenstam; in fact, this could be Stina doing disco-funk, which alone guarantees an [8]. The extra point comes from two things. Its dynamics are masterful — the stilled, bass-heavy tension of the beginning is let out in bursts: that squawky sample, animal cries that become disco strings and, after an almost a cappella bit, a full-band breakdown. The lyrics are vague — is she singing about a shattered friendship? a breakup? general turmoil? Whatever it is, the emotional timbre is right. If you’re going to invoke monsters, you should probably sound this haunted.
[9]

Sally O’Rourke: The title “Here Be Monsters” offers the first clue that Tieranniesaur’s funk-disco groove isn’t quite what it appears to be. The next is the flickering piano line, just audible enough to be creepy. Annie Tierney’s voice is neither bold nor eccentric enough to suit the track’s dark undercurrent, and the liftoff at the end promises more drama than it delivers; still, it’s vaguely unsettling in a way that demands you to play it again as soon as it ends.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: The menace implied by the title isn’t anywhere to be found in the singing — no, you feel it in that loping, prowling bass line that makes you feel both hunter and hunted. For four minutes, it works its way into a steady, intriguing disco groove, only with hush rather than hustle. And that would be good enough, but “Here Be Monsters” waits until then to unleash its trump card: going all “Take Me Out.”
[8]

Brad Shoup: Normally, amateurish voices are a real draw for me, but not when they’re so tentative. “Here be monsters” is the kind of phrase best invoked by black metallers, or perhaps tale-telling twee-poppers. Mewled on a shambolic disco track? I’m still coming to terms. Even as the retro strings keep their cool, the band threatens to come undone at the end, with terribly off-beat drumming the biggest culprit. Still, it sounds intentional; if the vocalist had borrowed some of that nutty confidence, that’d be something to get excited about. 
[5]

Alfred Soto: How nice to hear a femme-anchored, sleepy-time variant on Golden Earrings’ great “Twilight Zone,” especially updated with twang guitar at the four-minute mark. But what is this doing? What’s it saying? No one asked them.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: A year ago this time I said that Ke$ha’s “Cannibal” played with misogynist tropes of the monstrous feminine, and was accused of putting things into the song that weren’t there. I wonder if I’ll be accused of the same here. Annie Tierney’s vocal performance is a lot more conventionally pretty and measured; the threat is all in the slow build of the music, the repeated — and unheeded? — warnings. Where be monsters? Inside all of us, surely.
[8]

Anthony Easton: The video scares me — nightmare fuel, totally scares me. How the track speeds up and becomes more paranoid as the video progresses scares me more.
[6]

Alex Ostroff: Drifty and not unpleasant, but nearly four minutes in and it hasn’t made an impression beyond Scissor Sisters beat + “Bootylicious” guitar trill + house pianos. [4]. Except then the last minute and a half happens, which is this awesome guitar funk off-key saxophone mess of joy, probably worth about an [8]. You do the math.
[6]