Hometown: New York.
The lineup: Ezra Bang (vocals, synths), Sara Belle (bass), Linus Jackson (synths), Mio Kuromori (synths), Ralph Phillips (drums).
The background: They look amazing on paper, this five-strong boy-girl collective who use an array of samples, vintage synthesisers and distortion pedals to create a "revolutionary" brand of "guerrilla funk". They've toured with Public Enemy, they call what they do "no rave", which is quite smart, and "trash hop", which is only marginally less so, and they've been described as having "the energy of a thermo-nuclear hip-hop meltdown" that "attacks the listener from the very first moment". They are, because of all this, immediately impressive – but they can pall just as quickly, which is possibly why, even though they've been around for a while, they haven't appeared on our radar, because the signal must have grown weak as it left the source, or something. In their private war between style and substance, style wins. All the claims made on Ezra Bang and Hot Machine's behalf are incredibly promising, most of them positing the band as some fabulous collision of opposites – they're a fuzzed-up OutKast playing thrashed-out 80s synths! They're MC5 rapped up by Mantronix! They're Sly Stone meets the Slits! They're Schooly D shagging Gina X amid the rubble of German industrial-metal's collapsing new buildings! – but those claims are hardly backed up by the music, let alone the rhetoric.
Led by Ezra, the New York-born grandson of a pentecostal bishop, their live shows are fuelled by his camp energy and are apparently orgies of antagonism and auto-destruction. We haven't seen them yet, but we're imagining a contained, curtailed, east London fashionista version of sedition and violence. They do a lot of shouting, literally and in their song titles. Their debut single was called What U Can't Kill U Must Envy, and their new double A-side bears the titles The White Power and Pussy Got 9 Lives. It's the language of Detroit cicrca 69 and of rap-rock circa 89, with shades of both Public Enemy's and Rage Against the Machine's insurrectionary fervour, with a bit of garbled sex-talk thrown in for added sleazoid texture. But it feels as appropriated as that sounds, and they don't have a Bomb Squad at the controls to add production heft to their lyrical barbs. It's OK, don't get us wrong, and they've clearly got tons of ideas; it's just that most of them belong to other people, and in the end Ezra Bang and Hot Machine start to feel like a simulacrum of subversive energy, a facsimile of rap-rock rebellion.
The buzz: "A camped-up, sexually charged, punk-rapping ear assault."
The truth: There's less blasting brilliance here than there is bluster and shop-worn ideology.
Most likely to: Cause a rumpus in Hoxton.
Least likely to: Be taken seriously in Harlem.
What to buy: The White Power/Pussy Got 9 Lives double A-side single is out now on Gold Swine.
File next to: The Heavy, Rage Against the Machine, Age of Chance, Public Enemy.
Links: myspace.com/wearehotmachine
Tomorrow's new band: Andrew Morgan.
