The Vintage Chimps are a band who like to have fun. Not in the usual ways of sex drugs and rock'n'roll excess favoured by their more famous and glamorous counterparts though.

Rather, the VCs make their fun in the way you always used to make yours when given free range with all the stupid effects on your school keyboards. Or was that just me?

They may not have worked out a single definitive, distinctive sound for themselves yet, but this does not matter too much. Variety is, after all, the spice of life.

The result is that, in the space of just four songs, the Chimps take you through a guided tour of their musical universe incorporating pits stops at the musical stylings as different as The Bees, Leonard Cohen and even the mechanisms of Kylie's "Can't Get You Out of my Head".

Mechanism is certainly a good word as far as the first two tracks go. "Amber" begins with electronic revving sounds, followed by plinks, plonks and pluds accompanying the forlorn lyrics of a man mouring love lost and opportunities not embraced. It's a bleak but beautiful song: the relentless mechanisms in the background only making the ruttiness of life look bleaker.

After all that, you may need cheering up, which you get in the second track. This is where the Chimps do comedy - weird, abstract comedy. It is an instruction to gardeners not to attack cats playing in ones garden, using, as a cautionary tale, the example of a monkey with a bum biting fixation who can't throw sticks due to a lack of opposable thumbs.

The moral to the story is not particularly clear, but who cares. With a distortion overload applied to the vocals and tune that sounds like it escaped from an old computer game, this is a very strange, but very enjoyable song.

The next song, another contrast, is like a coastal sunset committed to sound. As a backing vocal glides over the rolling synthesiser like an evening tide, the vocalist sings an unrequited- love song to "Mother Abigail" ("You know I found religion when I looked into your eyes").

We've all been there. We've all done it, and that, along with the lilting, easy going feeling, may be what makes this song the gorgeous thing that it is.

The final song on the EP is synth heavy, like something from the early eighties. There are hints of Leonard Cohen and "Momentary Lapse of Reason" era Pink Floyd here. Once again, there is something of a tidal rhythm to the song as the gloomy lyrics of "indifferent faces", "unconscious strolls" and frequenting "places that I could not describe". And once again, it all comes down to not being able to have the woman of his dreams.

Come on girls! Give the man a break. There must be someone out there who wants him (bum-fixated monkeys need not apply).

28/05/03 - First published on www.bbc.co.uk/gloucestershire on this link