Amazing Radio‘s Head of Music, Tom Cotton, is back on the blog! He pitched two articles for today; trust me, you’re getting the better deal with this one. PRIS are a particular love affair of his, and ours, and so we were more than happy to give him the proverbial floor to explain, in no uncertain terms, why PRIS are better than your band:

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1. They have great songs…

It may be stating the obvious that any brilliant band will have brilliant songs, but trust me, PRIS do. Musically they play a brand of playground punk which is both joyous and obnoxious in equal measure. They also pack a punch lyrically, mixing tales of young lust with the sort of trenchant put-downs that would make a group of youngsters shout “BUUURRRNNN“.

So whether their targets are clueless ex boyfriends (The Better You Look, The More You See) or cringe worthy bands (Blu-Tack Baby) by the end of a PRIS song, somebody is normally sent home with their tail between their legs.

2. They’re actually worth seeing live…

How many gigs have you been to where you pay in, only to watch a band stand rigidly on stage and plough through what can only be described as a glorified practice. Then, as they finish their last song, the singer leans over to pick up his can of Carlsberg (it’s always Carlsberg) and utters his only spoken word of the evening “cheers.”

Well seeing PRIS live is the complete antithesis of this. Cat, Mary, & Agatha take to the stage looking like a love child spawned by The Runnaways and Hole with the attitude to match. They attack each song with that word that Louis Walsh is no longer allowed to say. Whilst front grrrl Cat moves round the stage as if she’s Debbie Harry from an alternate universe, a universe where she’s fallen in with a really, REALLY bad crowd. Once they’ve opened their set with a ramshackle version of The Clash’s Janie Jones you’ll be vowing to never go and watch a glorified practice again.

3. They don’t try and be cool, they just are…

They don’t wear fake glasses, they wear sunglasses. They don’t pretend not to care by standing still; they play with vigour and don’t actually care what you think. They don’t spend their DIY videos pouting and moaning, they spend them having a blast. They don’t give interviews in hushed tones because they’re far too cool to annunciate, they do it because they’re on lunch and they’re holed up in the disabled toilet. I’m not making this up, here’s exhibit A. I rest my case you honour:

4. They bust people’s chops…

Chances are, if this isn’t the first piece you’ve read on PRIS, you’ve probably already heard about “Wang Gate.” If you haven’t, let me fill you in. In a rather ill advised interview, Ellie Goulding declared that she was a fan of the alternative music scene, as well as Journey‘s Don’t Stop Believing. Obviously this is worthy of ridicule, but what would have taken mere mortals like me paragraphs, took PRIS 7 simple words. “Why Ellie Goulding is a massive wang.”

But it’s not just Ellie Goulding who’s come in for verbal chop busting, after Jessie J declared she’d never heard of PJ Harvey, PRIS asserted their desire to have never heard of Jessie J. Adele, Coldplay & Elbow have come in for the same sort of treatment, as well as their new favourite target Spector. So if you don’t already, get following @pris_off on twitter. Even if you don’t agree with whose chops they’re busting, the panache with which they do it is a joy to behold.

5. They might just be the band we’ve all been waiting for…

On one of my rock ‘n’ roll Friday nights in June, I re-watched Pulp’s Glastonbury performance from 1995. This performance wasn’t only magnificent because Pulp had brilliant songs but also because those songs were connecting with all those people covered in mud on another level. During the course of that performance, Pulp were becoming a zeitgeist band, helping people make sense of their lives and making the personal profound. It’s easy to look back now and say the 90’s were full of these bands; whether they were from Seattle screaming over distortion or from Manchester modernising the sixties and picking a fight with whomever they wanted. Skip forward into the new millennium and it’s hard to make a case for any band having broken beyond cult status to resonate on that level.

Well with the right set of circumstances, and a bit of luck, PRIS might just be that band. They might be unlikely to connect on a traditionally “emotional” level, but their appeal goes beyond just their music. They’re a band to scrawl on your pencil case. A band to sneak into a club to see play. A band that makes you throw all your previous plans out the window and start a band. Of course this is all opinion, I could be wrong. But all I know for sure is the world would be a better place if we had more bands like PRIS, and whilst we don’t, they are a band we need to cherish.

Check out more from PRIS at their amazingtunes.com profile.