Inquiet: Yé-Yé Bears

Which genre does this belong to? Naif-noise? Inquiet is a Melbourne man who sings bad teen poetry lyrics deliberately off-key while hammering on a keyboard. It’s deliberately (and I’m saying ‘deliberately’ twice because it’s worth emphasising that this is obviously deliberate, and that he’s not simply an awful musician) skewed away from any ordinary definition of good music. It’s not an intelligent sound, you’d be embarrassed to sing along to it, and the beat is lousy. Even if you put it alongside the work of other musicians who make songs that are bundles of deliberate awkwardness and simplistic singing (Scando freakfolkers, for example) it still sounds crude by comparison. There are two responses to this. Either you dismiss it straight away as unlistenable rubbish or else you hang around and the persistence of the man grows on you until you start to like it. Or, if like seems too strong, at least you’re fascinated by it, or willing to tolerate it, or it amuses you, or you admire his willingness to sound as if he’s taking the mickey (or you just shrug at this mickey-taking and say, “Typical teen-twentysomething boy”), or you begin to think that he’s making an interesting experiment and treading in the footsteps of other interesting experimentalists who have come before him and that going your own crude way like this is very, very rock.