Inspiration for songs comes from many places. While the boy bands and balladeers of this world will usually restrict themselves to love, requited or otherwise, other musicians are happy to explore more interesting terrains.

And so The Beatles gave us “Yellow Submarine”, Blur gave us a lesson in astronomy with “Far Out” and Pink Floyd brought us "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict”.

Everything Everything have embraced this tradition with their single, “Photoshop Handsome”, a nonsense poem of a song which loosely orbits the theme of graphic design. The result is a series of lyrics worthy of a twenty first century Edward Lear (or perhaps even Stanley Unwin). What, precisely, does “I put a rainforest in an Oxo cube” mean, for example?

Similarly, it’s unclear what we’re supposed to make of lines like “Foxhound frolic on the abattoir floor” and “My teeth dazzle like an igloo wall”. My own suspicions are that the band entered a few key words into a complex song generating database and a computer produced the rest of the lyrics. How else would you get a line like “chest pumped elegantly elephantine”?

For all the nonsense, there is much to like about Everything Everything and their single. “Photoshop Handsome” is a fast moving riot of a song which fuses all the chaotic excitement of Keith Emerson at his most frantic with the fast paced lyrics of The Futureheads.

With the B Side, “DNA Dump”, comes more of the same. The music is slightly less chaotic (with emphasis on the “slightly”), but the lyrics are just as bizarre: “breastfeed modem”, “bring me back a bitmap baby” and “bloodclot breakfast” being three such examples.

07/05/09 - First published on www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk on this link