Fear 2 Stop - The Napkin Fairy

Hear The Track Here

God bless Fear 2 Stop. I've spent so much time and effort with these guys and despite me feeling really good at their new found musical maturity, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Most dedicated fear 2 Stop watchers will be only to well aware of their propensity to aurally noodle (ie wander around aimlessly), playing with some really strange sounds. It's only the last year or so that their music has developed the muscle we have - to our delight and amazement I might add - heard in tracks such as Drawn, the awesome Dishevelled, Giving In and loads of others in a slightly weirder vein. It's almost as if, over the years, their music has grown from a fairly amorphous experimental hodge-podge to a sleek, often highly efficent way of getting their particular musical point of view across.

Think folks, we saw this band's music grow a backbone!

And what a fekkin backbone it's proving to be. Although I find The Napkin Fairy slightly less urgent than their better works of late, there is still power going on behind the usual F2S bleepishness and - for my money - that is what is making their music so attractive to many people who had written them off as just another experimental band. I personally think they more than 'paid their dues' as it were, and I think it's high time that people started to realise that - like a lot of other experimental artists - they have developed a musical voice that reaches way beyond experimental. Having said that, there's a lot more on this track that is experimental in sound and fury and I think that fact alone may limit this tracks appeal.

The most immediate reference that sprang into my mind was of New Order's Blue Monday. That's because there is a marked similarity in the basic instrumentation, but that's as far as that particular theory got me. Once you are over that 'heard it before' feeling you will realise that in total this is nothing like the aforementioned reference and could only have come from from F2S. It's as if they took one single riff from that track, and diverged as much as possible from it before the track runs out of time. You'll probably have to give it a bit of airplay to really get into it, it's a bit odd at first but soon (probably when the madness sets in) it all sounds as if Fear 2 Stop have no intention whatsoever in dropping a musical bollock at this stage in time. Strangely enough, this and a couple of the other tracks I have mentioned lead me to surmise that this stuff would probably sound much better in a live situation because it's made B-I-G. btw, there is a bit of a overhang in the version that I have, leaving a weird cutoff right at the end of the track. Easily remedied.

Highly Recommended meaty electronica with that distinctive F2S twist.