Dear PR who sent me the album by Mikaela’s Fiend,

I can’t remember which PR you are, but I think you’re one I trust, and that your CDs come in foreign-stamped packages, and I like those. Anyway, you sent this through in good time for last issue, and I put it on the albums list and no one picked up on it or reviewed it, the fools! I should have done it myself, but I was super busy and I thought maybe someone else would do it. I described it as: “Two teenage boys who are like some kind of baby Lightning Bolt from Seattle. Sick riffs and fake-jazz-metal drumming and some occasional samples and an audience of shy noise kids with their arms folded.”

I think that last bit of the sentence put people off, so maybe it should have continued “…watching while the band fling themselves around and go nuts and bounce off stuff!!!!” Anyway, my fault either way, but now I’m doing a ritual cleansing of all the music from my desk, and the best things I’ve found/refound so far are a new album by Metalux, and this Mikaela’s Fiend release (We Can Driving Machine on SAF records. It is definitely the most fun of the two. It’s one of the most truly playful albums I’ve heard in ages - pretty much every song works on the premise of “OK, so what happens if we…?” and then the premise of “YAY!!! That’s what happens!”, and it doesn’t matter that much if other people have made that discovery already, because it’s so fun trying stuff out, and it sounds great.

Mikaela’s Fiend are basically a pretty good guitar-and-drums-and-ring-modulator representation of the sound of how it feels when you’re in a moshpit and you fall over but it’s OK, times a million, in a few different time signatures, at full volume, wildly distorted and all sped up. Thank you for sending me their album, it is loads of fun.

FMMxx