Dananananaykroyd - Hey Everyone!

We’ve never really been that comfortable spelling ‘banana’. It’s a bit like ‘queue’ for the sadistic, with a side order of ‘have we got enough ‘na’s there yet?’. It’s this kind of behavior that makes Dananananaykroyd both our favourite and least fave act to scribble about. For what seems like a middling eternity they’ve been buzzing around the collective radar, spewing out mind spasticating slices of win, yet it always takes about ten minutes, a phonetic finger count and a Google check to be sure we’re not getting it wrong again.

With the traditional ‘isn’t that name amazing/awful’ paragraph is out of the way (the former, if you’re wondering), there’s plenty of room to think the lords of brutal screams and side orders of cardigan twee that finally, at last, after all this time there’s an album. ‘Hey Everyone’ is twelve tracks, some of which we’re already well acquainted with, some shiny and new; all just as great as expected.

Granted, however much we’ve seen recent single ‘Black Wax’ loitering round the underground edges of the music channels, it’s never truly a mainstream concern. It does have a chorus that’s packed with earworms that soon turn it into the first, and possibly least likely, isn’t-the-weather-getting-a-bit-nicer-let’s-have-a-picnic ‘anthem’. Whacked up against the angular stutters of ‘Totally Bone’ there’s a satisfying crunch that bleeds into the practically perfect ‘Pink Sabbath’.

‘The Greater Than Symbol And The Hash’ and ‘Infinity Milk’ both sound better than ever; the latter expanded from ‘Sissy Hits” fifty seconds that left the listener wanting more to a full four and a half minutes that acts as a goose-bump forming center piece for the entire record, both audibly and metaphorically. While any comments about great potential seemingly fulfilled may sound a bit like they’re being cribbed from a press release’s wet dream, it’s this metamorphosis that encapsulates just what a triumph ‘Hey Everyone’ is.

Produced by Machine (also responsible for turning Johnny Foreigner’s fearsome signs of ace-dom into reality last year), this is an album that’s both satisfyingly violent, subtly tuneful and, dare we say it, not so hard to swallow that it has to stay an underground concern. There’s no need to be downhearted here, that band with the name we can’t spell will be causing us sub editing nightmares for a while yet.