Marmozets

Marmozets seem to be the latest buzz word on everyone’s lips and with their debut album, The Weird and Wonderful Marmozets, dropping this week, it looks likely that they are here to stay.  Formed of two sets of siblings, Becca, Sam and Josh MacIntyre and Will and Jack Bottomley, Marmozets have been on the live scene for a while.  I saw them supporting Feed the Rhino a while back and they impressed me then with their energetic show.  Back then their sound was also a lot more mathcore, something that they have by no means lost on this release, but which they have honed and in many ways perfected into some cracking tunes.

Because trust me, if there is one thing that can be said about The Weird and Wonderful Marmozets, it’s that it is full of some big songs.  Combining the mathcore insanity of Rolo Tomassi, with the catchy choruses of Paramore (I realise the laziness of comparing them to two other female fronted bands, but I genuinely do seem them as the touching points) could either go awfully wrong or very well and thankfully for Marmozets, this album ticks all the right boxes.

Right from opening track “Born Young and Free” you can already smells hits all over this album.  Now such a smell obviously has two effects, one; thousands of people falling in love with the album and two; tens of people on the internet proclaiming it as shit and, lets put this out there right now, there will be lots of people in Metal Hammer comments threads calling this band out for, ‘selling out’.  Quite frankly I think anyone that believes that it insane, particularly when you consider this is their first album, but also because this album is just great.  I understand it not being to everyone’s taste, but there is so much great stuff packed into these 13 songs that if you don’t find something to enjoy you should probably just go away or at the very least stop moaning about it on the internet.

The rest of the album lives up to the potential of “Born Young and Free”.  On tracks like closer “Back to You” they show their ability to mix things up, with it working as more of a slow track, with an air of the dramatic and in which Becca proves she has the vocal chops to pull that kind of thing off.  In fact her ability throughout the album to go from the sweet to the insane, suggests that she is a star in the making.  The intricate drumming and weird time signatures that make mathcore, mathcore, is all there, but like all the best bands from that genre (Dillenger Escape Plan being the obvious ones) it doesn’t get in the way of these also being cracking songs.  If “It Is Horrible” doesn’t make you want to flip tables and just go a bit nuts, then you may want to get checked for being dead inside.

Marmozets are setting themselves up to be the shock package of this year.  As I said, I saw them live a while back and as much as I enjoyed them, I would never have believed them possible of dropping an album as enjoyable as this one.  It is probably pretty obvious, but it is, without a doubt, one of my albums of the year and if anything I’ve described sounds like something you would want to check out, I suggest you get up and do so right now.