Atiptoe – ‘Pages Apart’ [Review]
Throughout ‘Pages Apart’, South-East alt-rockers Atiptoe blend Biffy Clyro’s off-kilter riffs with clean and pristine guitar-pop commercialism, resulting in four tracks sure to satisfy musos and casual listeners alike. Everything you need is here: Precociously tight playing (‘Congratulations Professor’); badass guitar intros (‘No Dogs (Dogs Kill Penguins)’); frenetic five-Jägerbombs-in-ten-minutes energy (‘Rud’s Yard’) and catchy lyrics layered over mathy complexity (‘My Flexible Friend’).
On arriving at Camden’s legendary Electric Ballroom, I learnt three things:
Very few bands give as few fucks as Baby Godzilla. Even fewer bands use this trait to their advantage; there’s a very fine line between “putting in no effort” and genuine fuck-giving-free music. Baby Godzilla, however, are on the right side of every line. Every track on Knockout Machine is intensely chaotic, and yet makes perfect sense. In fact, if you were to force Baby Godzilla into a tightly-quantized corner, the results would most likely lose every last iota of structural integrity, and just dissolve into something utterly unlistenable. 
A common accusation levelled at those whose core beliefs revolve around science and humans is that they are little more than logic-driven robot people, cold and emotionless, utterly devoid of the ability to feel ‘real feelings’. Their favourite music is assumed to consist of late-Seventies robot pop (Kraftwerk / The Normal / Giorgio Moroder / etc.) and the various electronic music styles birthed since that era, while their favourite activities are presumed to be a) watching Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens videos on YouTube, and b) arguing with Creationists and Christians in the comments.
Deep in my iTunes library sits a humble two-track EP by a long-dead band called Strobe 45. That band, when it was around, was completely insane. It was common for their detractors to dismiss them as either being unable to play or sounding so bad that it made no difference – but the truth was, Strobe just didn’t give a fuck. That singular quality made them a quality band. Once you were accustomed to their raw-as-a-Dirty-Sanchez-episode noise, tiny sparks of genius made themselves permanently known, enabling you to listen to something most would deem unlistenable not just out of some misguided musical masochism but rather out of genuine, ecstatic appreciation. 
Sometimes a little research goes a long way. I first discovered Key Of The Moment while researching 
Well, fuck me. These kids are pretty angry! Hardcore prog-punk’s been a fairly trendy genre since the rock world wised up to the genius of The Dillinger Escape Plan, and few bands following in Dillinger’s wake have made a serious, crystal-clear-obvious effort to escape their heroes’ back-flipping, ceiling-walking, onstage-shit-flinging shadow. But on Tell-Tale Hearts Now, Voyager do precisely that. 
Time and patience are beautiful things. Without time, you’re screwed: You’ll wind up late for everything, faced with angry people at every turn, and you won’t get anything done. Without patience, you won’t use the time you do have effectively, squandering it instead on the pursuit of instant gratification and doing nothing of any lasting usefulness.
This has to be the dirtiest album I’ve heard in a long time. The most recent instrumental offerings collected in TMMP’s archives have been markedly slicker than Spooky Action (