"I know what I want/ I want off this roundabout!" Given Malachai's apparent fondness for turn-of-the-1970s British music-- Badfinger, schmaltzy AM-radio pop, or the grainy reggae imported by England's Jamaican immigrant class-- this lyric from the masked Bristol duo's debut could very well just be a colloquial reference to traffic congestion on UK motorways. But the manic, cut-and-paste aesthetic that members Gee Ealey and Scott Hendy exhibit on Ugly Side of Love also suggests that the lyric could be a rejection of the (re)cyclical nature of rock, what with the 80s post-punk resurrection that informed so much indie over the past decade now yielding to 90s alt-rock revivalism, like clockwork. For a band like Malachai, who are more interested in toying with unfashionable pop arcana than conforming to hipster-baiting trends, it's hard to tell what's more wearisome: the prevalence of genre-centric nostalgia, or the fact that it recurs at such predictable intervals.
Now, Malachai-- previously Malakai, before a namesake California rapper claimed legal dibs on the "k"-- are hardly ones to present themselves as futurists; Ugly Side of Love seems deliberately designed to evoke the dusty-grooved ambience and freewheeling feel of a UK pirate-radio broadcast from 1973. But unlike so many Britpop bands who tried to recapture the spirit of a bygone era by writing and performing songs that sound like their favorite albums, Ealey and Hendy simply take the posturing out of the equation altogether and just sample them wholesale. Ugly Side of Love is thus a rock album pieced together by crate-diggers, one that's eager to undercut notions of authenticity to emphasize its own pastiche quality with obvious samples and abrupt edits.
Surprisingly, the liners list only two sample sources, one of them 70s-era UK crooner Daniel Boone's "Sad and Lonely Lady" being repurposed on the boogie-rock stomper "Snowflake". But there's clearly so much more where that came from: "How Long" loops the Guess Who's 1970 single "Hand Me Down World" into a piece of hand-me-down rock that deviously cuts its sample off mid-guitar-lick; "Shitkicker" revs up on a riff reminiscent of Heart's Camaro classic "Barracuda" before sling-shooting back on a cavalcade of incessant handclaps, Gee's double-tracked harmonies and, of course, more cowbell; the reggafied rumble "Warriors" not only name-checks the 1979 gang flick, it uses the film's climactic, bottle-plinking "come and out play" taunt as its hook. But Ugly Side of Love is more than just the sum of Malachai's dollar-bin finds. In Gee, they boast an elastic vocalist who perfectly embodies band's mischievous approach, yielding performances that are by turns sinister (the mutant acid-rocker "Blackbird") and heart-on-sleeve sweet (the bubblegum-soul serenade "Another Sun"). Ironically, it's his least affected performance that feels the most forced, with the clap-along campfire jam "Moonsurfin'" coming off like a commercial jingle ("Now it's here/ Grab a beer!") pitched at trustafarians.
Considering Malachai's Bristol roots and flair for sample-based recontextualization, it's no surprise that the duo has found a champion/mentor in Portishead's Geoff Barrow, who first issued the album last year on his Invada imprint and served as its "executive producer." Indeed, the sole Barrow co-write, "Only For You", carries heavy, cannabis-infused whiffs of Portishead's film-noir funk. But Malachai are actually most reminiscent of Clinic, another shadowy outfit who debuted on Domino some 10 years ago. The latter tapped more canonical cult-rock sources like the Velvet Underground and Sparks, but exhibited a similar adeptness at processing and repackaging disparate reference points into seemingly familiar yet freakishly alien two-minute pop songs. And if, like Clinic, Malachai are too respectful of their retro sources to fully veer off the rock'n'roll roundabout, Ugly Side of Love nonetheless revisits a moment in British pop history through a series of surprising U-turns and thrillingly illegal lane changes.
