HMLTD – or Happy Meal Ltd until McDonalds’ lawyers got in the way – are an antidote to years of jeans-and-T-shirt bands. Sporting fake furs, fishnet vests, Elizabethan ruffs, ladies’ blouses and oodles of makeup and brightly coloured hair, the London “art project” look like the result of a riotous party in a theatrical outfitters, inviting visual comparisons with early Roxy Music.
There’s certainly no one like them around now, and the sextet’s music is a similarly characterful, colourful chaos. Genres and sounds are tried for size and hurled away like outfits. There are surf-punk twangs, glam stomps, tinges of dub and dubstep and what sounds like the recorded rumble of an articulated lorry, all within the opening number. Phrases leap from the cacophony. “What’s the point? We’re all the same. I think everyone’s a little Stained,” yells frontman Henry Spychalski, who later declares: “I’d rather be dead than in chains.” There are echoes of Nick Cave’s Birthday Party when the blue-barneted singer ends up topless atop a monitor, whipping up the crowd into an almost tribal frenzy.
However, nothing approaching a memorable tune arrives until the last three songs. Then, Where’s Joanna is a disorienting fairground whirl and To the Door rollicking Adam Ant-ish rockabilly. Still, if they’re lacking great songs, monster funk closer Is This What You Wanted? – a sort of debauched Talking Heads – supplies a killer groove.
HMLTD aren’t the finished article, but in homogenous times for pop, they’re already the least dull band in Britain.
• At the Great Escape, Brighton, 19 May. Then touring.
