Joe Peacock is a British singer-songwriter and musician who was born and raised in rural Herefordshire and now based in Birmingham, England. Describing himself as “a genre-hopping storyteller, whose music has been compared to Bowie, Blur and Costello”, he cheekily adds “all money from the digital sales of my music go into paying producers/mixing & mastering engineers.” Not only is he a hard-working and talented songwriter and musician who’s not afraid to continually experiment and push himself beyond his comfort zone, but also a thoughtful family man who cares deeply about the environment, social justice and inequality.
Mr. Peacock rediscovered his creative spark during the Covid lockdowns, and began writing and recording songs at home, handling all aspects of performance and recording. The prolific artist has released a tremendous amount of music in over the past three years, including three albums – I’m Only Here, in April 2021, Before the robots told us where to go, in December 2021, and Mirror Neuron Generator, in July 2022 – as well as numerous singles and four EPs, one of which, The curse of the mind, I reviewed last August. In addition, he’s also one half of art-folk duo The Missed Trees, his side project with singer/fiddle player Louisa Davies-Foley, who released their three-track EP Animals last April. Now he returns with his fifth EP Beast Mode, featuring six fascinating animal-themed tracks based on real events. He hosted a listening party for the EP yesterday, in which he provided lots of insight behind each track.
The EP kicks off with “Pass the puffer“, a song inspired by an episode of the BBC program Spy in the Wild, which detailed how dolphins swimming round a puffer fish can become blissed out from small doses of the lethal toxins emitted by the fish. He was prompted to do a bit of research on dolphins and created a song not intended to be political or animal rights based, but simply a cheeky observation of the dolphins’ strange behaviour. “One bite can paralyze and kill a human, but dolphins get a buzz off the neurotoxin. Are they purposely experimenting, then going off to look at their reflection? Pass the puffer before the seas get rougher.” I love the edgy cinematic synths, grungy psychedelic guitars and pulsating synth-bass, and the chirpy dolphin sounds early in the song are wonderful. Peacock’s vocals remind me of Damon Albarn, frontman of British bands Blur and Gorillaz.
“Fed to the tigers” tells the story of Marius, a two-year-old giraffe born and raised at Copenhagen Zoo. Though healthy, he was genetically unsuitable for future captive breeding because his genes were over-represented in the captive population, so the zoo authorities decided to euthanize him on February 9, 2014, after which his body was dissected and necropsied in a public educational class, then fed to the zoo’s lions and tigers. Peacock notes “They didn’t want to sell him to some private collector or a circus so decided the most humane thing was to kill him and feed him to the tigers. I don’t make a judgement, just think it’s a dilemma that’s worth thinking about.”
His lyrics are both bitterly direct and heartbreaking: “Perfectly healthy (and utterly adorable). The zoo said it had no choice, but to kill poor Marius. Shot through the head, he died instantly. He will take up space for more genetically valuable giraffes. He is of no use to us and he costs us money. We can’t exceed our carrying capacity. Overpopulation is a problem you know.” The dark, spacey synths and heavy guitar tremolo lends a strong, disconcerting undercurrent to the track.
On “Cyborg (Broken Animal)“, Peacock explores the idea of using technology to control or even alter humans and animals. He elaborates further: “There’s a philosophical element to it in terms of how we should feel about experimenting with impulses going straight to the brain to control movements and things, plus a bit of a fear of what if it goes wrong and robot-insect armies start attacking us!” He sings “I’m picking up a signal, picking up a signal. My brain is now wired differently. I didn’t pop a pill or flick a switch, but I am tuning in now. See the cyborgs all around, the offspring of necessity. Our motherboards are so corrupted, we are all breaking down.” Musically, the song has a quirky but pleasant sci-fi vibe, with lots of glitchy synths and a gnarly guitar solo layered over a bouncy, repetitive dance beat.
One of the six tracks is a remix of “Cyborg” by the EP’s producer Chris Marney, titled the “Cyborg (Cyber Madness Remix)”. Marney removes Peacock’s guitar solo and fortifies those glitchy sci-fi synths with added sheen, also expanding the track by one minute and ten seconds. Peacock’s vocals have also been put through a vocoder, enhancing the overall spacey vibe. I can’t pick one over the other, as I really like both versions.
“Sweet Kiss of Death” was inspired by a true story about a young Irish horse trainer and jockey named Frank Hayes who died of a heart attack while riding a horse named Sweet Kiss in a race at Belmont Park in New York in 1923. Hayes died in the latter part of the race, but his body remained in the saddle when Sweet Kiss crossed the finish line. Peacock wrote the poignant lyrics from the point of view of the horse, who was nicknamed Sweet Kiss of Death for the rest of her life. (Wikipedia) “I don’t know why your heart failed, but you’d been under pressure to lose weight. You strove and sweated, denied yourself water. Was it all too much? You never complained. Laid to rest in your racing silks, you were ready to ride again. When the reaper paid a visit, I felt your dead weight before we crossed the line. They called me the sweet kiss of death, but I carried you home.” The song opens with a what sounds like a melancholy electronic oboe, which is soon joined by what Peacock calls a weird talking bass sound he used to keep the song from sounding too overly reggae. Despite the rather dour subject matter, the song still has a lighthearted feel.
The final track “Radioactive Hybrid Terror Pigs (24 remix)” is a reimagining of a song he originally released as a stand-alone single in October 2022. Peacock says “It was the first song Chris mixed for me, so I thought I’d bring it back. It was fast and punky all the way through before, so I slowed down the verses and chopped up the guitar line, adding a few synth elements, too.” The song was inspired by a story he read about how wild boars moved into contaminated land in Hiroshima, Japan after World War II. They didn’t appear to have suffered any ill effects from the radiation, and eventually inter-bred with domesticated pigs that had been left behind in the desperate aftermath of the disaster.
Peacock added “The title’s a little bit sensationalist, but when I read it, I just thought that has to be a song! Thematically it fits perfectly with this EP.” The remix verses are sung in a skittering, almost dubstep groove with gnarly guitars, accompanied by sounds of blaring sirens as he sings “A nuclear disaster took all the humans away. Down from the mountains the boars made a foray into the dangers of the big exclusion zone. Almost indestructible, this place became their home.” The music then ramps up to a furious galloping pace in the choruses as he plaintively asks “What can we do now they’ve moved in? Radioactive hybrid terror pigs. Fierce and wild, but domesticated, too.” It’s an entertaining take on a somewhat creepy subject.
Though Beast Mode might not be everyone’s cup of tea, I think it’s pretty brilliant, and another fine example of Joe Peacock’s impressive imagination, songwriting and musicianship. He also created the lovely cover art for the EP using AI.
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