Flooding out of Glasgow, Scotland in 2022, Water Machine quickly gained a reputation for their weird and wonky art-punk, winning hearts with sing-along songs about dogs, struggling artists and the housing crisis. Their ascendency over the past few years has seen them release music with GoldMold Records and Upset the Rhythm, and play UK shows with Shannon and the Clams and The Orielles, stopping off in Salford for a BBC Radio 6 Music live session.
The world of Water Machine is a swirling eddy of melodic bass lines and volatile guitar sliding between jazz chords and punk riffs, all the while narrated by sardonic social commentary and silly stories. Driving rhythms thumped out on a sparse kit with cowbell flourishes are reminiscent of Beat Happening and The Jesus and Mary Chain, while cherubic vocal and violin harmonies hint at country and folk influences. A band with pop sensibilities and indignant punk urgency, these oddballs dart from sweet C86 to spiky post-punk, often within a single song.
Debut album God Park takes a collection of disparate influences and distils the disjointed into something new. Taking influence from everywhere – from LiLiPUT to The Pastels – the tunes are always on the verge of falling apart or breaking down. Whether it’s the bubblegum pop of lead single Tiffany or the country-punk bait and switch that is Hando, their frantic genre-hopping is always underpinned with anarchic joy.
This group of young Glaswegians recognise that they owe something to the city’s rich musical history, in particular the 1980’s scene captured so brilliantly in Grant McPhee’s documentary, Teenage Superstars. “Glasgow has a distinctive sound and energy that we definitely feel a part of and inspired by”, they’ll proudly tell you.
In places, the songs do indeed echo hometown touchstones such as The Vaselines and the arty, pre-Ecstasy, Soup Dragons, plus the bands on Postcard Records. The track, Tiffany, for example, is a terrific tribute to early Orange Juice.
Similar to their predecessors there are affectionate tips of the hat to pop’s past. Handclaps and harmonies hark back to the ’60s. Organs grind like garage nuggets. Motown gets mutated through Rickenbacker jangle. River boasts Tropicalia-like touches. Throughout, bass-lines pay homage to Peter Hook.
Glasgow’s Indie legacy is only the half of it. Tracks like Dog Park reference The Ronettes, The Shangri-Las, via The Ramones, and the results rock like a meeting of Sonic Youth and The Bush Tetras. Junction, a raucous score for head-banging and stage-diving, shouts its chorus, a mix of Beastie Boys and Rage Against The Machine. In contrast, the acoustic, fiddled Jimmy’s Waltz, makes like The Pogues sharing a slow dance with The Marine Girls.
Tired of listening to songs about gloom and heartbreak, Water Machine, instead, want their lyrics to provide a “realistic escapism.” Their words, while rooted in the day-to-day-maybe-mundane, are spun into what the band call “hyper conceptualised allegories.” So while they might sometimes sing about love, this is hidden amongst copulating clouds, car crashes, housing crises, rabies outbreaks, toxic jobs and unrequited office romances. Deftly demonstrating the collective’s strong / unique sense of humour.
Everything on the album packs positive, punk energy. Think The Buzzcocks, though, not The Pistols. The closing Hando, for instance, is a final curveball that begins as a confused country singalong, born in the blues, but ends in The Clash-like thrash.
