Test Icicles

CIRCLE. SQUARE. TRIANGLE

R-831472-1320773508

This 2005 single was never aimed at the likes of me:-

mp3 : Test Icicles – Circle. Square. Triangle.

This lot had probably broken up by the time I first heard the song which would have been on one or other of the  music video channels in an end of the year round-up.  Taken from the bio on the website of their label:-

Sounding like a bootleg Def Jam t -shirt at the end of a sweaty party the Test Icicles trio made a sound already casting a long shadow of influence among their peers and a new generation of messy hyper-hormoned kids.

The trio of 25-year-old Rory Atwell and 19-year-olds Sam Mehran and Devonté Hynes burst out of underground file sharing sights and into messy one-off gigs in friend’s houses in a riot of shredder guitar solos, beatbox rhythms, fringes and drainpipes. Whilst many bands claim to be “into a bit of everything” Test Icicles sounded like everything they’d ever heard, spewed out and re-wired for a different type of moshpit etiquette, a brand new teenage riot.

The tracks on their debut album For Screening Purposes Only sounded like mash-ups of themselves and the single Circle, Square, Triangle became a modern nightclub staple. Their live shows were an eruption of metal poses, injury, boy and girl crowd surfacing and air punching – a spectacle that any award-winning stylist would have trouble improving.

Just as the mainstream media were beginning to get their heads around peer-to-peer networking and the power of MySpace the band that had truly evolved out of below the radar networking did the unthinkable and split – and left a perfect mess of themselves on record.

So there you are…a song by a band aimed solely at the kids and how they consumed music and yet here I was at 42 years of age falling for its charms.   I was drawn to it by its energy, its rawness and the fact it had so many different post-punk and new wave influences.  The kids probably had heard very little like it, but I had a cupboard full of vinyl that said otherwise.

I have never had any desire though to even search out any other song by Test Icicles. Having this 7″ was good enough for me.

Here’s the short and sharp b-side:-

mp3 : Test Icicles – Lmno Hoes

Enjoy!

2 thoughts on “CIRCLE. SQUARE. TRIANGLE”

  2. I hated Test Icicles. They had a shit name and no tunes. They set the trend for all the awful hipster bands that followed and who continue to bombard our airwaves with their plinkety-plonkety electropop-lite nonsense. They have a lot to answer for.

    On the other hand, Lightspeed Champion has made some pretty good records. I loved ‘Madame Van Damme’.

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