Single Review: Flung

At times dizzying and sometimes catastrophically frenetic, Flung descends into chaos.

Flung is the first of four singles set for release over the coming months from Blenheim’s guitar bashing wastrels Big Scout.

As described by the band, Flung is the story of a friend who went through drug rehab, “Only in the song, rather than relapsing hard she fakes her own death to return to her childhood home of the idyllic far-North.” A beautiful bit of revisionist history distilled through a flurry of noise like the flouro tagging on an end credits roll.

Flung is pretty much a spoken word post punk song. It opens with an almost clean guitar tone lightly strumming some chords as tiny feedback babies drift in and out of the air. After an appropriate warning period and a couple of taps on a snare the tempo gets turned up to a chanted nursery rhyme that outside of this raucous song you might imagine kids playing skip rope to. The guitar is angular and hectic with bits of electric protrusions shedding off it. Throughout this strain the guitar remains melodic and catchy, giving way only to let some fuzz muffle up the space between refrains and mark out the rests between amp squeals.

At this point, in the video for the song, three men take a shower together after eating sausages in a bathroom. The delivery reaches its final cataclysmic level of quickness at this point, remaining remarkably faithful to the melody as the rhythm catastrophises.

Surprisingly, Flung strikes me as a dance song. Not dance music, but a party song begging you to move with all the careless enthusiasm of a small child. It runs for a little over 2 minutes and in that time it shifts gears up at least 3 times and makes me want to shake my whole body and then fall over in a spent heap. It’s a bloody good time.

There is a side B to Flung called Everything Must Go which leans even more into the spoken word stylings, albeit in a more protracted and reflective way. The song waxes philosophical and poetic in a more abstract story marred by childhood memories and pointed juxtaposing. The sound of the vocal reverb on the wall comes through weighted to the left ear but the dry signal remains fairly crisp and legible. This gives it a feeling that doesn’t quite equate to dreamy or subconscious but maybe something that feels like “side” conscious. It’s a perfect sound to bring out the time-killing feel of the lyrics. They play out like the kind of thoughts that might float around your brain while lying back, head rested against hands, on a grassy hill in the sun looking at clouds.

It just occurred to me that Everything Must Go actually makes a perfect follow-up to the collapse after the dancing frenzy of Flung. As a unit these songs play like a euphoric sugar rush. It’ll be exciting to see where these next 3 upcoming singles take us from there