Welcome to Parrot Eyes

Kids of Zoo’s 18-minute new album is gripped with a mania worthy of an amphetamine bender, writes PATRICK EMERY.

There’s an Enid Blyton story I read initially as a child, and subsequently as a parent. It tells the story of Leslie, a young boy afflicted with the very un-Blyton trait of laziness. Like so many Enid Blyton’s stories, the narrative has a warped moral arc: Leslie’s disposition toward inaction is detrimental not only to his own curricular prospects, but an indicator of a wider moral turpitude anathema to Blyton’s conservative social and political instincts.

Faced with his father’s promise of a new bike if he curtails his lazy ways, Leslie pays a visit to the old woman who lives in the wood; the old woman sells him a “little yellow pill in a box.” Like the rock stars of the 1960s who would discover the stimulating wonder of diet pills, Leslie’s demeanour undergoes a manic transformation; for the next 24 hours Leslie is on the Blyton equivalent of an amphetamine bender, barely about to rest before his chemically-enhanced brain dispatches him to undertake yet more physical tasks.

There’s not a lot of Blyton’s moral compass in Kids of Zoo’s new album, Welcome to Parrot Eyes – any statistically possible chance of this band going all Christian rock has clearly been missed again – but there is a mania reminiscent of the effects of Leslie’s special yellow pill.

There are 10 tracks spread over barely 18 minutes, with only three songs troubling the two-minute mark. Fittingly, the Wipers-inspired rant ‘Clean Shave’ starts proceedings, the song’s title possibly a literal reference to grooming, but maybe metaphor for a new phase in life. ‘Young Children’ is somewhere between Dead Kennedys in San Francisco in 1979 and Minor Threat in Washington DC in 1986; if there was ever the soundtrack for arresting the malaise of youth, this is it.

“Not since a children’s barbeque have I witnessed such a nexus between anger and processed meat products.”

‘I’m in the Black, Man’ is so brutal it hurts: this is the sound of that SST punk record you heard when you were 17, and which shut your mind off to that faux rock ’n’ roll shit your high school friends embraced, and opened your brain to a world of infinite punk rock possibilities. ‘This Is Not Your Pantry’ has to be metaphor; either that, or it’s the abrasive punk equivalent of a sticky note in a sharehouse telling everyone to take their petty gripes and get the fuck out of your face. Then there’s ‘Sausages’ – not since a children’s barbeque when the snags ran out prematurely have I witnessed such a nexus between anger and processed meat products.

‘AC Bladder’ pistol-whips you with ne’er a concern for your psychological wellbeing; get up or get the fuck off. ‘Shoot’s Newie’ is all disciplined beats and jarring chords; there’s an order in there somewhere, probably just beneath singer Tim Wold’s emphatic vocal instructions. ‘Drop the Penny’ is on a mission to do something, anything, before it’s all too late; ‘Bad Nanna’ is the closest thing to a ballad on the record – and it’s nothing like a ballad – and stares straight into your eyes and gives you a few home truths you really needed to know.

Finally, there’s the ode to everyone’s favourite sporting footwear, Dunlop Volleys – or maybe it’s got nothing to do with the shoes Evonne Goolagong wore when she won Wimbledon in 1980, and everything to do with finding an obscure analogy to sum the perils up a shitty relationship.

By the time the record finishes, you’re transformed and devoid of any lingering malingering personality traits. Enid Blyton wouldn’t like this record at all, but she might just appreciate what it could do for society.

+

‘Welcome to Parrot Eyes’ is out now on vinyl and digitally through Every Night is a Saturday Night.