It’s been a long, arduous road of a career for Britney. From the scandalous naughty-schoolgirl music video for ‘…Baby One More Time’ to the infamous head-shaving meltdown of 2007, it’s stunning Ms Spears is still… Wait… No, sorry. That’s not right at all. Apologies. The Britney we’re actually here to discuss are a jagged, noisy punk rock trio from Edinburgh, who have recently unleashed their third album, the ‘cleverly’ titled ‘Britn3y’.
If the band’s moniker, panache for hilariously not-hilarious album names and garish pink and yellow Bandcamp page do not make it clear enough, we’ll just go ahead and say it: Britney are masters of being obnoxious as an art form. They seem to be doing all in their power at every moment to enrage, aggravate and just plain annoy anyone who may accidentally come into contact with their music, likely whilst searching for the recorded works of the aforementioned pop princess. The saving grace is that it is completely, 100% awesome.
Right from the off, ‘Britn3y’ is a glorious cacophony of yelping, off-kilter drumming, stabbing and screeching bass and snotty attitude. Punk in the truest sense, everything found within the album seems designed to piss people off, disturb the status quo and make a heap of clatter whilst doing so. There are many reference points we could throw out there: there’s a wonky nihilism and creepiness similar to Manchester’s legendary Kong, an unmistakable tinge of The Locust in the band’s grindier moments, and the sleaze and recklessness of Daughters bleeds all over the album.
That’s not to say that Britney are plagiarists by any means though. By pulling together a patchwork of similarly anti-conformist acts, they’ve created something that’s entirely their own. Which is probably for the best, as it’s unlikely many other bands would want to claim this work for themselves – not for a lack of quality, but for the tortuously unhinged nature and what it could do to the psyche of anyone not already in on the joke.
Britney play by their own rules, the main of which on the surface appears to be ‘there are none’, though it’s hard to believe something this artfully damaged could have been created by accident. There’s some kind of intelligent design at play here, simply one hidden underneath layers of bubbling synth and the sounds of what is very likely a member of the band barfing.
As heavy, ‘alternative’ music continues to grow in popularity, there seem to be less and less bands out there really taking chances and doing something outside the box. Sure, there will always be acts like The Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge who continue to push boundaries, but we seem to live in a time now where much of the caution-to-the-wind wackiness and fun, let alone sense of humour, have all but evaporated from extreme music.
Though Britney are hardly likely to be appearing on the front cover of Kerrang any time soon, the service they’re providing the British (and, arguably, global) music scene is an important one: they’re reminding us that being heavy doesn’t always mean corpse paint and grimacing. It can be pink and it can be stupid and it can be teeth-gratingly messy. It can be three Scottish men in horrible shirts with a bass, a thousand effects pedals, a drum kit and a keyboard.
JAMES LEE