Fitted

A jam that became an idea that begat a group. First came the name, Fitted. And now this. The LP ‘First Fits’. Try it on for size.

Comprised of Wire’s Graham Lewis and Matthew Simms Mike ‘Minuteman’ and latter-day Stooge’ Watt and Bob Lee (Fearless Leader, The Freeks) the group ‘formed’ after just one practice to then perform at Wire’s DRILL festival in Los Angeles in 2017.

Interspersing post-punk jangular doyens Wire’s coded crypticisms (‘testicles spooling on a carpet of rice’, anyone?) with The Minutemen’s ‘jamming econo’ and adding in The Freeks’s shock n’ roll and you end up with ‘First Fits’: a (dis)jointed, swirling noisescape that suggests (in their ordered chaos) half-baked throwaway efforts with absurdist prose(lytising).

Repetition, repetition, repetition oozes throughout ‘Plug in the jug’, a motorik Neu-Can-Who-do (metro-gnomic witterings with subtle traces of ‘Baba O’Reilly’s tinkling-technoises). Lewis’s stretching larynx and quasi-singing voice a perfect match.

‘Training pit bulls for the navy’ has Watt’s guttural growl supplemented by Robert Quine-like guitar-gesticulations. The hairy-tale ‘The legend of Lydmar Lucia’ is all-asquawking, squawling, screeching and skronking held together by a William Burroughsian cut-up dub. A deadtime story.

‘The chunk that got chewed’ is a pure Captain Beefheartian mumbo-jumbo gumbo, with further surrealist imagery augmented by a Pere Ubuish stop-start freneticism. ‘The First Fit’ is a ten-minute Hawkwind-like cosmic climber.

These four avant guardians poetically articulate nonsense into non-sense. Get involved, THAT makes sense.