The Durds

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Cucumber Mosaic Virus Rampages Through My Field

(Photo by Mick Whieldon)

The Durds were formed about five years ago in Exeter, Devon, UK as an outlet for the obsessions of singer/songwriter Daniel Cray. He is sometimes aided by Michael Parker, Ku Sun-Tzu and now mainly by Pete Westaway. Matthew Shepherd and Mick Whieldon occasionally help too.

They have played live with the likes of San Francisco emo-types Thee More Shallows, trendy London disco-art-punk posers Selfish C**t and the legendary Crazy World of Arthur Brown. There are four classic Durds-based releases (a 12" and three 7"s) on Eeriephone Records.

The Durds like to make nasty, funky, folky pop songs and do not care whether they are done on computer, groovebox, Playstation or Spanish guitar. The Durds are desperation-fuelled electrofolk tied to a belief that pop can and should be about anything (this tends to mean the usual tortured artist fare such as violence, decay, illness and unrequited love/lust).

Dan would love to grow as a person and write about other stuff but he is finding this hard. He has recently, however, developed a fetish for starchy Caribbean foodstuffs, European legislation and authors whose books he's never going to read.

Cucumber Mosaic Virus Rampages Through My Field is The Durds' debut long-player on Banazan Records and tackles all of these great themes.

An encyclopedic foray into electrofolk, switching from acoustic "guy with a guitar" ballads to straight up dance and back again.

The Duds - Cucumber Mosaic Virus Rampages Through My Field
REVIEWS

The cover art of this first album by Exeter’s Daniel Cray and gaggle of likeminded pals is typically Dudsian, serving to evoke classic English weird lore, but the record itself dwells much less in the old green idylls of the grotesque and the irrational than some might expect. It is certainly there in ‘The Habitats Directive,’ Cucumber’s opening track, which seems subtly to mock the notion of a representative of empirical surveillance and regulation ‘striding through the gorse’ to stamp his authority on the rampant, liquid, spirit-haunted life of the wilds. It’s synth-hop that is elastic and amphibious in its attributes, bestrewn with chipmunk gasps and frog-chorus phrases on the keys. A kindred composition is the album’s beguilingly melancholic title track, the speaker of which seems somehow inadequate in his use of precise, prosaic language in reference to Mother Nature’s unruly and obscene plagues on his crops. Daniel’s voice, conveying a sense of mundane English respectability bearing traces of contamination by the weird and the absurd, is perfect for such material.

Daniel, however, is too butterfly-restless not to try other tacks. ‘Seven Stone And Falling’ is a domestic Gothic drama about weight-loss being the boss, and it captures something of awful dream sensations when one imagines oneself to be plunging endlessly into a big black nothing. Flashy synths expose themselves in a murky mix of guitar and drum machine in a way which suggests a choleric Cure circa Seventeen Seconds attempting to write a Space Disco hit. Early 80s synthdance tendencies are given freer reign on ‘Sultry Summer Nights (At The European Court Of Human Rights),’ which makes a valiant and disconcertingly persuasive stab at exoticising the Strasbourg judiciary.
Almost equally fanciful is ‘Lytton Strachey,’ which hits on a relaxed, punting-on-the-Cam acoustic mood as Dan sings, somewhat improbably, of making lewd sexual advances to the early twentieth-century Bloomsbury intellectual. (Note, however, that the subject of ‘Harsh Barton,’ a bass-gorged piece of downtempo Orbitalism, is quite explicitly ‘a barton that’s built on a marsh,’ and not in fact the abrasive Premiership midfielder).

Such whimsy, quite in keeping with the spirit of this record, no sooner raises its head than it is instantly and vigorously rebutted. ‘Lytton Strachey’ is succeeded by ‘What Do I Have To Get Up For?’, wherein a knife is slid into the onanistic, chronically demotivated student (‘I’m pissing away my inheritance up against the wall’) to a witchy Massive Attack-on-an-8-track sound, the compulsive sluggishness of which registers perfectly the link between inertia and the pleasure principle. Likewise, the spell cast by ‘Sultry Summer Nights’ is mercilessly evaporated by the bleak-as-death ‘511-Whitchurch-Shrewsbury.’ Here, wasp-in-a-jar synths permeate swarm-sonic delirium like an electronic rendering of a child’s nightmare triggered by a disturbing Public Information film of the 1970s.

The most glorious reconciliation of this internal conflict between the fun and the grim is what I believe is the album’s sole previously released track, the sadistic-public-servant anthem ‘Statutory Sector.’ It’s proof of The Duds’ gift for stirring up carnivalesque pop euphoria out of ingredients most wouldn’t hear of mixing together – Hounds Of Love Africanised chants, Kraftwerkian methodology, kitsch popular vocal group hymns to the space age, the sounds of sizzling human flesh…

Cucumber, to be sure, is a taste worth acquiring.

From Butterfly Crush

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