BDTD 072 Fantastic Doug and the Cupcake Club
An amazing band put together by Mel Simpson. A breakdance the dawn favourite, the songs are hooky. Blue Mountains
-Another amazing release from Breakdance The Dawn featuring Mel Jade of Craft Bandits. Cup Cake Club is Mel’s crude pop/rock outfit, who marry destructo avant garde raunch with exuberant no-technique Shaggs style, nada fidelity and a euphoric riff/hook logic. Fantastic Doug comes in special hand sewn art edition slipcases with stickers and paste-on details. Less focused on NY punk than their self titled CD-R, this one breaks up the scorch with odd, restrained keyboard/drum tracks with Mel’s vocals pushed way up front. “Real Boy” is a classic of confused bedroom DIY with Mel’s robot voice over jarring clusters of keyboard and clanking drums ala The Shadow Ring. Totally unique and highly recommended.- c. David Keenan 2011
- One of the recent slew of new relases from Matt Earle's excellent Breakdance the Dawn imprint, Fantastic Doug and the Cupcake Club channel a basement level vision of skewed pop and headache inducing avant-punk. whether you can handle forty minutes of this would depend upon your intolerance for tape hiss and inpenetrable noise or maybe whether you have access to a decent amount of codeine and whipped cream anisters. At timesthis reminds me of the hormonostupids masterful 'brutal.' at others it sounds like something that the incest survivors in feathers might mhave recorded if they were stuck somewhere along the marooka train line for a weekend and with nothing but a goon sack., a dictaphone, and an armful of cooking utensils. but the more I think about it, the more it bec omes apparent to me that this might just be the closet thing to pure pop music that I've heard from the label; and that makes it an interestindg edition to the catalogue, from a record label which seldom disappoints and which manages to consistently release music that is difficult to categorise. What I'm trying to say is that I'd have told you just as much thatthis entire review has had I just mentioned the record label it was released on, and since that was mentioned in the opening sentece the rest of what I've said here is essentially redundant. I do stand by that Factorymen referece, but. You can take your cupcake and shove it you stiking hippie, but this is a great tape. c. 2009 Brendon Annesley
