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 !!! interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.The dilated indie-disco dons return. It’s easy to forget just how revolutionary !!! (that’s “chk chk chk”, for verbalising purposes) sounded when they broke through in 2003 with their epic guitar-house single Me And Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard. In an era when the indie nation was still in thrall to the retrogressive rock’n’roll likes of The Strokes and The Datsuns, !!!’s loose-limbed, fearless funk helped guitar music to rediscover the delights of the dancefloor.Returning to the fray following the tragic death of drummer Mikel Gius (he was hit by a car whilst riding his bike in December 2005), the 14-legged groove machine are about to release Myth Takes, their third album and their most sharply focused work to date. “Justin (Van Der Volgen, bassist) produced the whole album this time around, so it was good to have him as a kind of conduit,” says guitarist Mario Andreoni of !!!’s newfound sense of directness. “That helped to keep the whole thing centralised. It was much easier than (previous album) Louden Up Now, which had a pretty scattershot approach.”  For all its accessibility, however, it’s still difficult to imagine how the band that produced the kaleidoscopic and boundary-trouncing Myth Takes ended up supporting the aurally conservative Red Hot Chili Peppers on their UK stadium tour of last year. “Yeah, it was interesting,” says Mario, without a hint of sarcasm. “Their fans run the whole gamut from people who’ve been there from the start to people who maybe only buy one CD a year, so it was kind of fun trying to win those crowds over. Some were a struggle, and some were really cool. To be honest, it’s better trying to win over 20,000 people in an arena than a few people in a tiny venue, ‘cause if it goes wrong in a tiny venue you can hear a pin drop [laughs].”  The vision of 20,000 RHCP fans shaking their souvenir programmes about to Hello? Is This Thing On? is a surreal one, and one that probably even !!! themselves couldn’t have imagined when they first emerged as part of the so-called “punk-funk” class of 2003. “I hate that phrase,” laughs Mario. “I never thought we sounded anything like The Rapture or any of those guys. The next thing we do probably won’t even sound like us. And this time that we’ve come to Europe, everybody’s talking to us about this ‘new rave’ thing. I would say to Klaxons, as a previous victim of pigeonholing, distance yourself from this new rave thing right now, ‘cause it can really f**k with you.”
Joe Madden
!!! – Myth Takes, released 26 February 07 on Warp.
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comment by badgirlswirlgirl
Feb 22, 2007
I was always intrigued about this band but managed to totally ignore them for quite a while. My brother went to see the Chilli's and said they were awful "with songs that went on for twenty minutes" So with my brother having quite bad music taste I checked them out! They are really great and I have only heard Heart of Hearts from the new album. Will be listening to the rest though, thanks for the album Collective!
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