Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s guitarist Billy Ward has one thing he wants people to stop saying about this band: that they’re being weird for weird’s sake. After four years of art-rock gigs nobody much noticed, and a debut album that swings from an Adele-sized piano ballad into a grunge assault inside the same song, it’s a reasonable thing to want cleared up.
The London sextet met through school, spent years on the capital’s DIY circuit, and now arrive with sold-out Scala shows behind them and two serious producers in front of them: Margo Broom, who’s worked with Fat White Family and Big Joanie, and Seth Evans, who produced Black Midi and Geordie Greep. That’s not a debut-album production team you get by accident.
Opener ‘Only Girl’ announces the approach immediately: a single snare crack detonating into shoegaze guitars and ascending violin lines, a pop melody buried somewhere in the wreckage and, against the odds, still audible. ‘Canyons’ does something similar in reverse, opening on a honeyed, Adele-sized ballad vocal before the strings turn hostile and the song collapses into grunge halfway through, without ever slowing down to warn you first.
‘Nosedive’ plays the same trick more patiently: a soft-pop opening that sounds almost conventional, until a ticking synth line drags the whole thing upward into something far more layered and far less polite. It’s the clearest evidence that the band’s chaos is deliberate rather than accidental.
That tension is most literal on ‘Something Else To Give’, the closer: a folky, unguarded verse that stops mid-line as violins suddenly crowd into the foreground, the ground shifting without warning. It’s a genuinely thrilling moment, and also the clearest evidence that six people can still be negotiating a song’s actual centre of gravity right up until the final bar.
Calling that “weird for weird’s sake” misses the actual issue. This is a band with more good ideas than one album can comfortably hold, working out in real time which of them belong to Man/Woman/Chainsaw specifically. Most of the time, on this evidence, the answer is all of them at once.
