My thoughts on this band:
1) Lyrically, they’re horrendous (‘I want to be with you, I don’t want to be alone’ ‘and I try to need you, but you didn’t trust me, you’re making me go a little bit crazy’)
2) They sound ridiculously like The Drums.
3) The name The Mono Polys really infuriates me for no apparent reason. (Not technically about the music….)
So, with all that said, why am I then writing about them? Well, because somehow, they’re just plain and simply awesome. I Want To Be With You is three minutes of frantic, upbeat indie pop, dripping with sickly sweet honey and lashed with half a kilo of sugar. Elsewhere on their debut EP, entitled LIFE, you can expect much of the same; the Joy Division bassline of Growing Old and the jagged riff of You Think You Know It All.
I want to be annoyed at the pure simplicity of the tracks, but I just can’t, although the spoken sentence’s at the start of several of the tracks (‘Some people think they know how to live their lives’ – You Think You Know It All) are intensely dis-likeable, coming across as an even more cliched sample from Skins. Think The Maccabees, Cajun Dance Party, and of course The Drums, and you begin to understand the sort of harmless, guitar pop vibe that The Mono Polys strive for, and perfectly achieve.
LIFE is out now, check out a couple of tracks in this article, and head over to their bandcamp to grab the full EP.