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Aisle 16 - Poetry Boyband
Review by Phil Smith
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Against wall-high projections, shifting from one-to-one sarcasm to something creepier, Aisle 16 lay a thin band of words on a visually soaked world. High on profile, so deconstructed they are positively vanishing, this is a full-on farewell tour for poetry, an English classroom catastrophe, a satirical withering of all the concentrates of verse's dificult targets - Pound, Eliot, modernism basically.
And then they save it...
Through their white-suited boyband personae - layering banality on banality until it becomes disturbingly lumpy and hard, a weapon to chip away with until there is only vinegar for blood. Then, tartly, they begin to put the pieces back together, reconstruct the emotions, glue back the connections, but, like bar staff clearing up after a pub fight, not necessarily in the original order.
They look like advert angels and there is no mistaking their wicked intents (some of them realised in tents). They are "the pun made flesh", a head on collision involving an early Open University broadcast and the milk van that ran over Roland Barthes. In 'Silent Pylons' "altars to alternating current " begin "fizzing with the human condishun" but end in darkness, a thin web of fading stanchions on screen, a faceless voice promising every song sung unaccompanied.
Given that they never show us more than the "tip of the skateboard" there is always a depth to their vapidity - 'Britain's First Paedophile Prime Minster' is a truly chilling journey from sick satire to something more unnerving, a conflation of personal and mass ethics. 'The Fuck You Apple' mines a very thin seam of sentimentality and they end with a sweet encore on their own in-built obsolescence. This is complex stuff that is never less than completely accessible - much harder than it looks and sounds, it's work that makes its audience feel as clever as audiences really are.
Well worth the 6000 years wait for their "15 minutes".
Download review as word document (28K) 
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