I don’t know much about The Four Disorders, and that’s how they seem to like it. A brief heads-up email arrived about them the other day, but lyrical hints and a single downcast, distracted photo don’t tell me much more than that they’re probably based in Hackney, that they’re a boy/girl duo (Mi-Shan and Joe), and that they’re not big on eye contact.
Mi-Shan and Joe of The Four Disorders (photo © The Four Disorders)
There are just two Soundcloud demo tracks so far, both demos. Not quite a secret, not quite a single. There’s a contradictory whiff of reclusive hipster to this (not necessarily a bad thing – I dip into hipsterworld sometimes, and it’s a guilty relief to find someone there who hates self-promotion). What I can glean about The Four Disorders, therefore, comes mostly from their sound, which somehow manages to be both dark and breezy.
Rhythms are closures : minimal drum machine clacks and markers, enough to pump the songs along up-tempo but otherwise just nails holding the box together. Sidelining (or suppressing) the sparse and begrudged clusters of starved, spangly guitar, Mi-Shan offers greyed-out nighthawk pads of budget string-synth. Moods are made or broken on Joe’s upfront bass guitar, which looks and sounds almost as big as he is, whether it’s trudging down the beat with a dour plectrum-hammer or traveling on a supple, pianistic twist of growling melody. Allowing for home-studio roughness, they end up somewhere between Sisters of Mercy (circa the clenched and hooded cynic-rumble of ‘Floodland’) and the brighter, more forgiving dance-pop of Saint Etienne (sprinkling reappropriated, refiltered tints of classic pop sounds over washed-out London suburbs).
Whenever Joe opens his mouth, however, it suddenly turns a bit teenaged-Neil-Tennant. He sings with a similar small-voiced and beady tone – brittle and nasal, watchful and dry. Like Tennant, Joe also wears heartache and reflection as if they were part of the same, wrong jacket; tight and a little irksome. On Cat Lady he sighs, with a hint of exasperation, “I could love you if you drop this nonsense.” Over glum keyboard chords and a chilly, thudding bassline (and with a hint of cocaine weariness), he outlines the stagnant mind games which keep score but eventually lead to nil. “You think you know it all, you think you’ve got my life worked out, you think you see right through me, / but you don’t know me and I don’t want to show you. / You think you’ve got me in a corner, you think you’ve outmanoeuvred me – / but I show you only half the truth / and it cuts me out, it cuts me out…”
With excruciating – and accurate – teenage gawkiness, the song flickers between states and stances. It travels rapidly from poised bleakness (“you think you’re only using me to satisfy you when you need it / I wish that’s all you wanted from me, but I can feel the pain inside you”) to the unwanted sympathy, sincerity and pathos of the schoolyard underdog scratching for love. (“You’re smarter and more popular than me – / it’s true, but I just wish that you could believe it too / and put yourself at ease.”) In its dance of masks and blushes, it feels like a mash-up of Brett Easton Ellis and ‘Waterloo Road’.
That awkwardness, that inability to maintain a fixed pose, seems deliberate: a conscious, complicit songwriter’s choice. On Hell And Hackney, Joe takes on the insubstantiality and self-indulgence of his peers, but even while taking it to task with verbal barbs and jabs, he brings in the rueful tone of the implicated. “Aimlessly we drift, like a frivolous emotion, or a dream that fades into the day / Further round the bend, delirium advances; / we bite the hand that tries to save… / We’re still pretending there’s another life, / parallel and far away.” There’s more fizz to this one, too: counterpointing her blocky keyboards, Mi-Shan fires out digi-gastric hi-NRG gurgles, bell-tones and sub-bass quirks over Joe’s rolling bassline.
Joe, meanwhile, lunges into the malaise to root out the muck, distraction, and confusion. “We’re only alive when we drop out of skies, wash away the compromise, / we’ve nowhere to hide, nothing left inside, forgotten what we’re trying to find… /Sad to say, we wash away the day, / destroying our time. / Cast away, sleepless we lay, /wasting our pride.” As he breaks his own cool surface, skidding vigorously between scold and clarion call, you can almost forgive him for skidding for hideously out-of-tune; especially when he tears a window in the torpid clouds towards the end. “Yes, I know how miserable it seems, / laying blame and thinking of those long-forgotten dreams; / but I hope someday we wake up, laughing at the mire we’ve left behind, / to find it’s not too late.”
Dour tones and duff notes notwithstanding, this has promise: at the very least, I like the idea of a more Gothic spin on Pet Shop Boys. Even if Joe and Mi-Shan still won’t look me in the eye…
The Four Disorders: ‘Cat Lady/Hell And Hackney’
The Four Disorders (self-released, no catalogue number or barcode)
Stream-only demo tracks
Released: 10th April 2014
Get it from:
Stream only on Soundcloud and YouTube.
The Four Disorders online:
Misfit City 