DIY industrial pop could be the music of the future: BOLT ACTION FIVE fill us in on their energetic sound
Supping on a diet of fashion, art and horror films, London based DIY industrial pop foursome (well fivesome if you count Mr Sizzle, the 1980s Japanese drum machine) Bolt Action Five have arrived for your listening and viewing pleasure. Vocalist Dan Nurtha gave us a quick history of the band and proceeded to an irate rant about the nu-rave scene.
Nurtha first met guitarist Tobias Hughes after responding to an advert he had put out to start up a band. Dan knew he wanted to do something musical with his life and expands frankly: "I hadn't been in a band before and I had quite a lot of music written. I can now, but back then, I couldn't really play instruments that well so I knew I had to rope some other people in". And so he did, with himself and Tobias writing a lot of the music and organising their first few gigs. Tobias already knew Mark Meerkat the keyboardist from their shared film studies course, and Ian Galloway was recruited later on bass.
Having been influenced by a never-ending list of varying artists which includes Les Savy Fav and Nine Inch Nails; this could go some way to explaining their somewhat multifarious melange of sounds. When asked to describe their music, Nurtha exclaims: "Basically we're writing pop music, music that's pop structurally and is catchy but at the same time it's heavy and using lots of other influences like dance music and industrial." This is beautifully realised in their first single 'Tree Friend Tree foe' where the 80s keyboard sugar coated synths, alongside a simple bassline, driving beat and incessant screeches produce a catchy pop gem akin to something likely to spring from the minds of Pop Will Eat Itself or Devo.
Considering he mentions dance music in the description, we wonder whether Nurtha has pondered the oft denied and criminally overused umbrella term nu-rave as perhaps one of the numerous cliques they may be associated with? "It just seems like a really cynical move[ment]...I don't like rave music from the early nineties and all that shit. I like colour but I'm not gonna start wearing fluorescent. I mean we never wanted to be part of nu-rave...and now it's on the way out, thank God, we're happy. It's just annoying that the media penned us down as that – We're like 'What the fuck is nu-rave?'...It's not a genre of music, it's an aesthetic and that pissed me off that it became more important than the music."
When asked what makes BAF great musically, we are treated to a playful answer of: "Definitely not our dance moves, that's for sure! We argue a lot so I think the fact that we even produce music in the first place [he trails off] We're pretty productive though. We try and release as much as we can quite rapidly."
We look forward to the next release, which by the sounds of it, should be pretty soon.
Words: Naomi Misquita-Rice
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