Let's rewrite our last chance

In the summer of 2001, I was travelling around the U.S. with my parents. The music site I edited at that time had just started to take off, and I was getting CDs in the post every day to write about, which was terribly nice. For the trip, I brought two albums with me, to listen to on my temperamental Discman and subsequently write about. One was 'The Cold Vein' by Cannibal Ox - thoughts in a nutshell: amazing first song, forgettable rest of album - and the other was 'Vague Us' by Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi.

If you haven't heard of them, there's probably a good reason. The band were one of those ultra-indie types that existed around London quite a lot in the early years of this decade. Heavily influenced by Sonic Youth and Pavement, they wore visors onstage, put out singles on indie labels, played gigs in the capital all the time, and were generally unremarkable. Amazingly, though, they got picked up by V2 records, who put out 'Vague Us', the CD in question. Wacky guys, wacky album title. I actually got to interview the guys once, and I remember the sentence "Graham's just another word for wanker" coming up.

I played the album a few times on car rides around New Jersey, Pennsylvania and some other states in that area. And coming back to it after seven years, I'm pretty glad to say that my opinion hasn't changed too much. Maybe three great songs, and a lot of throwaway rubbish. But let's talk about the great songs - 'Hear the Air', particularly, is fantastic. It's fast, furious, doesn't really have a chorus, stops and then starts again and features the phrase "gallons of semen". All within the space of like two minutes. Enjoy!



[download Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi - Maverick]
[download Mo-Ho-Bish-O-Pi - Hear the Air]