Beggars Banquet haven’t half missed a trick here. Between 2001 and 2005, when London’s dead-eyed indie tastemakers were queuing up to kiss the sore-dripping hand of Pete Doherty, Ayrshire’s Biffy Clyro were being roundly ignored at radio and openly derided in the hipster press. Too weird. Too hairy. Too liable to throw a cerebral curveball. Heaven forbid we should have to listen and think at the same time.
But being the underdog paid off. Not only were there plenty of people around the country who did find real magic in their idiosyncratic time signatures, skewed melodies, grungy torchsongs and banshee spazz-outs, they took on a missionary zeal. So had this greatest not-quite-hits had come with all the B-sides there’d have been a stampede of tattooed Biffy nerds upsetting HMV staff up and down the UK right about now.
This isn’t for them though. A blatant cash-in after the breakthrough success of last year’s epic Puzzle (their major label debut), it’s a snapshot that captures their evolution for those playing catch-up. It’s a history well worth investigating. While tracks from debut album Blackened Sky revel in the warmly anthemic, fuzzy grunge and post hardcore the trio grew up listening to, it’s obvious pretty quickly that there’s something not quite ordinary about them, vocal duties flitting from frontman Simon Neil to drummer Ben Johnston or bassist James Johnston with infectious impatience. But it’s with follow-up long player The Vertigo Of Bliss that things get out and out strange. Apparently recorded in a manic one-day burst, even one of the most radio-friendly takes, ;The Ideal Height’, is peppered with off-centre guitar squawks and time signatures that don’t so much snub the rules as dead-leg them until they just give up.
By the time we get to Infinity Land they’ve brought together everything they always threatened, running the mind boggling gamut of eastern-tinged guitars and unhinged feral shrieking (‘There’s No Such Thing As A Jaggy Snake’), arse-shaking disco rock (‘Glitter And Trauma’) and blissed out dreaminess (‘Only One Word Comes To Mind’) that somehow make total sense together. No wonder Warners swooped in there sharpish.
They’re no one’s secret band these days – they were last seen headlining the John Peel Stage at Glastonbury and supporting Bon Jovi, to the bafflement of the BJ audience, at Twickenham. But that a band this pleasingly odd stuck to their guns to get here gives hope to bloody minded noise inventors everywhere.
