Overmono: Good Lies review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(XL Recordings)
Knitting garage with techno and chopped-up vocals, the pounding yet poppy debut album from Monmouth brothers Ed and Tom Russell is masterfully done

Overmono take their name from a suburb of their Welsh home town. You could take that as a knowing joke from a duo steeped in wilfully urban-sounding music, who specifically intended their celebrated 2021 Fabric Presents mix to evoke a winter’s night in south London. The idea of the authors of So U Kno, the reliably party-starting anthem that soundtracked the return of clubs and festivals after lockdown, naming themselves after a rural Welsh faubourg where, one assumes, there’s not much in the way of nightlife, is the dance music equivalent of a death metal band naming themselves Bourton-on-the-Water, or an anarchist punk collective called Little Missenden.

Or perhaps not. The Russell brothers only started working together after they had established themselves as producers in their own right: Tom as Truss, making punishing techno that found a home on Perc’s hard-edged Perc Trax label; Ed as the breakbeat-fuelled Tessela, his 2013 single Hackney Parrot the kind of undeniable tune that effortlessly crosses between scenes, a hit at grime nights and house clubs alike. But the music they make together seems weirdly informed by their rural roots. A decade older than his brother, Tom grew up on 90s mixtapes from Fantazia and World Dance, in an era when the music at those raves had split into two factions: jungle on one hand and the relentless four-four kick of happy hardcore on the other. But in a pre-internet age, Monmouth was apparently so far removed from the action as to render that factionalism – or any of the other boundaries that sprang up in 90s dance music – meaningless. “We didn’t have any ideas about where the music was from or how it was it made,” Tom told an interviewer last year: locally, all dance music was known by the catch-all title “rave”. Existing on a diet of records scrounged from his brother, or listening to him DJ through the wall, Ed was further removed still.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian