Mermaid Chunky – ‘Slif Slaf Slof’ review: brilliantly eccentric, funny and inventive avant-pop

13 September, 2024

Mermaid Chunky (Credit: Simon Pizzey)

LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy was in a coffee shop when he heard a song from Mermaid Chunky’s deeply bizarre ‘VEST’ EP, prompting him to sign the Gloucestershire avant-pop duo to his label DFA. Presented with that potentially career-launching endorsement, a new band could be forgiven for toning things down. Instead, Freya Tate and Moina Moin’s debut album ‘Slif Slaf Slof’ is even weirder: a startlingly funny, brash mix of folk, house and psych-pop which – for all its eccentricity – has real purpose and heart.

READ MORE: Mermaid Chunky: experimental duo with a thirst for fun – and fancy dress

‘Slif Slaf Slof’ centres on the surreal, character-driven lyrics of Tate and Moin. On album highlight ‘Chaperone’, Moin – cast as a divorced audiobook author from the Deep South – drawls before a packed Wembley Stadium: “my bosom is expanding so much that I can hardly see y’all faces.” Tate’s accompanying chants (“ride that pony, smack that booty”) have a spontaneous feel, like she’s barely completed them before bursting into laughter off-mic. Throughout the album, their dual vocals span melodic singing, spoken word and barked, David Byrne-esque ad-libs.

Instrumentally, the album draws a line between different conceptions of ‘party music.’ The euphoric opening track ‘Céilí’ takes its name from traditional Scottish and Irish folk dances, beginning with a simple melody on Moin’s recorder. As the melody is looped and layered, ‘Céilí’ morphs into a digital-age interpretation of early ‘dance music’, joined by the squelching synths and mid-tempo beats that dominate the album. It’s rather moving, and a strong throughline for the record: illustrating how people have felt this same pull towards dancing together since time immemorial.

This fusion of different sounds in longer, multi-phase tracks also provides ‘Slif Slaf Slof’ with real emotional depth. The music accompanying the story of a time-and-space-travelling dancer in ‘Tiny Gymnast’ is led by a trembling sustained organ, suddenly playful in the oompah main verse, then impossibly confident with the swaggering synth groove outro. It roughly charts the dancer’s surreal coming-of-age story, but also points to the sadness or uncertainty that may lurk behind the album’s extroversion and theatricality. This is also an album where mood and tone can turn on a dime: the creeping agitation of ‘Nature Girl’, with its cold, metallic live percussion sitting oddly on the electronic beats, is suddenly warmed by Moin’s yearning saxophone.

When this instrumentation is stripped back for the purely acapella ‘Medieval’, the track feels slightly lost. There’s the same offbeat lyricism – “are you a girl with a cone on your head?” – and sense of movement thanks to the pulsing, layered vocals, but it feels flat and exposed compared to their incorporations of these folk sounds into longer, more dynamic tracks.

It is this that makes Mermaid Chunky feel especially exciting: their keen sense of how to bring disparate musical ideas together. While ‘Slif Slaf Slof’ largely presents itself as silly, eccentric fun, the album’s combination of innovation and emotion makes it worth taking seriously.