Single review: Swound! – Predator 3

I’ve just had to trawl through the last few months of TDP emails to see if I’d been pranked somehow, and I’m still not entirely sure either way, to be honest. But no, this lonely little low-bandwidth mp3 in my “To Review” folder titled “Predator 3” came from a genuine PR outfit who I’ve worked with before, and a bit of Googling indicates that Swound! are a real UK band. I have yet to find a precedent for the startlingly nasty Christmas jumpers* they’re wearing in the sleeve art, however.

So, yes, “Predator 3”. It’s a song about the computer game, “Predator 3”. It has simple rhythms and Play-in-a-Day! jangly guitars. It has dead-pan nasal English vocals which wander around in the narrow no-man’s-land next to the Cliffs Of Off-key. It sounds like it’s aimed at thirteen year olds by someone who can’t remember being a thirteen year old. It’s like some horrible amalgam of Busted, Scouting For Girls and Screech from Saved By The Bell. There’s some Weezer-like ironic self-deprecation at work as well, but it’s not sharp enough to count as cutting and insufficiently unselfconscious to be a display of genuine pop naivete. In short, I’m struggling to comprehend that people apparently willingly pay money to see Swound! play on stage.

But they do, y’know. They really do; the press release has tour dates. They played Rock City in Nottingham a few weeks back. Yeah, that Rock City. Colour me stunned.

But then, I also see that they’re also trading hard on being the first unsigned band to supply a song for a Nickelodeon show or something… so maybe it’s me that doesn’t remember what being thirteen was really like (which is far from being the most implausible thing I’ve been asked to believe so far today). Perhaps Swound! are the authentic soundtrack to the pre-teen life as lived on the guitar-driven side of the tracks in this day and age; perhaps “Predator 3” is a masterpiece of the genre. I really haven’t a clue, to be honest, and doubt I ever will – which makes me wonder why I was ever sent it. *shrug*

*Christmas jumpers, for those that have never had the misfortune, were jumpers of particularly vivid colouration and violent/cheesy patterning (not necessarily related to the season, though sometimes) as made by the knitting-obsessed elderly relative(s) of the family, distributed every 25th of December to the tone of barely-suppressed groans of horror masked with platitudes like “oooh, I’ll bet that will keep me warm!”. I had hoped the tradition had died off alongside the generation that tended to produce the artefacts in question, but it appears that – much like many other horrible fashion practices of the eighties – they’re back with a vengeance.