It’s really hard in this day and age to astound listeners with new sounds and vibes that aren’t already flooding or have flooded the airwaves in some shape or form over the years. That said, MEGATIVE hit all the right anti-notes with a sound and a vibe that’s unlike anything currently out there.
Read: MEGATIVE is timeless. Also, their name kicks ass.
But I digress.
The brainchild of Tim Fletcher The Stills) and Gus Van Go (Me, Mom, & Morgentaler), MEGATIVE tread a fine line between Happy Mondays’ trippiness and Massive Attack’s trip-hop with Reverend And The Makers hyper-stylized groove and The English Beat and The Specials’ knack for dub-infusion and two-tone fronted by a dude with the swagger of Ian Brown on their eponymous debut. Got all that?
Don’t got it? Well, luckily “Have Mercy” is here as the ultimate mood setter and as a song that will easily define the MEGATIVE sound in a three and a half minute package. “More Time” continues the laid back grooves with Fletcher’s voice hypnotizing listeners and even more so on “Can’t Do Drugz (Like I Used To)” which follows and definitely shares DNA with the best of The Specials or The English Beat.
“Yeah Yeah Yeah (Yeah Yeah)” is another hard groover filled with the beats and the bass while “Bad Advice” mixes up odd time signatures with a wall of Fletcher’s vocals coming at you like a FORCE. “Can’t Get Away” gets back to simpler times when the groove was in the heart and later, “She’s Not Real” is a thumper with a surprisingly creepy vibe which turns into something else completely when those jangly guitars drop like out of a lost Wall Of Voodoo classic from the early ’80’s.
“Ghetto Defendant” is a beats-driven track interspersed by Fletcher’s Ian Brown-like bravado (Especially if you consider Solarized) and an almost ethereal trumpet line until he goes to a whole other plane of awesome with his vocal performance during album closer “One Day…All This Will Be Gone” with air sirens ringing out and that embedded groove powering on.
MEGATIVE’s self-titled banger is out on July 27th through Last Gang Records. You can pre-order a copy or two or three by clicking here. For more on MEGATIVE, head on over here.