This is obviously not a music blog, etc etc. Following Mark Ronson's rather laboured appropriation of top-down Zelda for the video to Circuit Breaker, a recent foray into chiptune-based hip-hop...
...come Pulled Apart By Horses, a Leeds-based four-piece often described as "the best live band in Britain". Their self-titled debut strips all excess from the myriad styles of rock music they take inspiration from - they've been most commonly tagged as post-hardcore, which may be partly lodged in truth, despite doing them a massive disservice - and emerges as one of the heaviest, fun and quotable records of the year. It's an LP which should unite both metal obsessives and alternative music fans alike. Inevitably that's not why I'm writing about them, or why they've been bracketed with, of all people, Mark Ronson. Nope, Pulled Apart By Horses earn a mention here thanks to The Crapsons, the record's second track and a glorious tribute to Link that sounds like Blood Brothers fighting it out on the main stage at Download; all great dumb riffs and petulant screams, wrapped up in a deceptively catchy two minutes.
The song's lyrics are brilliant:
"Link has the greatest catch in the world
Despite what you heard
And every time their hero comes
They're all waiting for some revelation
And every time he drops the bomb
The power, the courage, the wisdom!"
In an interview with Drowned In Sound, singer Tom Hudson explained that: "I wrote the lyrics for it after losing my life and soul to the Zelda games. The song basically reflects on the hero 'Link's' love of fishing, fighting, power, courage and wisdom."
Amen to that. While we wait for Nintendo to adopt The Crapsons as The Skyward Sword's new title music, here's what the track sounds like:
As the people who grew up with videogaming go on to do wonderful creative things in music, books, art and film - for example, Scott Pilgrim is out next week (25th August) - these heartfelt tributes to cultures 8, 16 and 32-bit will likely become more and more frequent than they are now. Still, when they're as good (and strangely touching) as Pulled Apart By Horses are here, they'll always be worth pointing out.
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