Ebola Disco — Discography 1997-2017
I've been involved in / listened to industrial / noise for over 25 years. At no point in my unglittered career have this motley crew ever shown up on the radar. Bugger it, they haven’t shown up on the gps!
A twenty year cd “discography” of twelve tracks tracks does not, it seems, show that this band had much on offer to output, let a lone made much impact. Seven of those tracks are live recordings, two are cover versions (“I Wanna Be Your Dog” and “Germanik” by Stooges and SPK respectively), so three original tracks fleshed out.
So this is the complete works of a band who made no impact on a small scene that wasn’t exactly overcrowded to begin with. Now, from that statement you might be forgiven in thinking that I’ve made up my mind I don’t like it before I’ve even started writing this review. But you’d be wrong: I am several listens before I’ve made that decision.
This is very basic music, it’s quite coarsely constructed, and when I think of the shear power and pain of the likes of Sutcliffe Jugend, Consumer Electronics and Whitehouse, Ebola Disco just don’t seem to cut the mustard. And yet the afore mentioned bands were making harsher and more unsettling music nearly 20 years prior to Ebola Disco.
The twelve tracks presented here begin with “River Ratz” a bass keyboard repeating riff that has squeals and distorted vocals over it. Following this is two & a half minutes of almost found sound put through a distortion pedal (“Kamakaze”) which builds to a crescendo of noise before dying off slowly.
Then we have “Flies For Friends” seventeen minutes of Radio inteference mixed with a bass keyboard and distorted vocals. This takes a good twelve minutes to build before it cuts off and the first cover version appears. SPK’s “Germanik”. The original is faster and more visceral, and doesn’t, if my memory serves me, contain a Kenwood chef for a milisecond half way through! “I Wanna Be Your Dog” started with a radio or tv sound sample of a dog attack before going into the song itself, no one does this song better tha The Stooges so why bother trying?!
Ebola Disco seemed to run out of ideas quickly, this “discography” doesn’t show those ideas held up to much in the first place. So a disappointing release from a label I truly enjoyed past releases from...oh well you can't win them all!