Description
The Armed – “Ultra Pop” LP
The Fourth album of extreme-pop-mayhem from this collective based in Detroit, Michigan. Active since 2009, but you may not have come across them before; until now I always found their releases impossible to get hold of – giving them an air of outsider mystery, further re-enforced by occasional titbits of information: their keyboard player – Clark Huge – is professional body builder; they surreptitiously sampled some Frank Turner recordings (which the truculent git didn’t like!); they once claimed that Kurt Ballou of Converge was their puppet master… The latter is probably untrue… but he is their sound engineer, and blimey, what a demanding job – when you consider that at least 19 musicians contributed to the album (members of Metz, Queens Of The Stoneage, Mark Lanegan, and the aforementioned Ballou all make guest contributions). Multi layered pop music, influenced by EBM, hardcore and screamy-metalcore (the type that was knocking around back in the Myspace years).
