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This Week's Singles
June 5 1999
Baz Luhrmann Presents
Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)
(EMI)
Unless you have been holidaying on Jupiter for the last two months,
this remarkable and potentially nauseating record will have burrowed
its way into your deep subconscious by now.
It was made two years ago, but the beauty of Australian film
director Luhrmann's audacious blend of homespun wisdom and
ambient house is how its universal, timeless, genuinely touching
elements transcend its kitsch, campy surface sheen. Luhrmann, who
made Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet, apparently
discovered the lyric a mock graduation address written by Chicago
columnist Mary Smich on the Internet and was intrigued enough to
set it to a pastel-shaded trip-hop cover of the early-'90s house
track, 'Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)'. Recruiting veteran
Australian actor Lee Perry to solemnly intone the text, a
self-mocking but wise piece of instant pop philosophy was born.
Dispensing priceless common-sense advice such as, "Don't waste
your time on jealousy... get plenty of calcium... do not read beauty
magazines, they will only make you feel ugly", as well as the
brilliant "be kind to your knees", Luhrmann's
postmodern masterpiece is half pisstake, half soul-soothing brain
massage and all genius; a DIY pop landmark for the end of the
self-help decade. Buy this record. Twenty years from now, in ways
you can't even begin to imagine today, you will be glad you did.
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Bjö,rk
All Is Full Of Love
(One Little Indian)
This is the first UK single release on DVD which would be a
meaningless marketing statistic in most cases but here, in the light
of Chris Cunningham's miraculous self-snogging
robo-Björk video, it becomes yet another landmark in the
Icelandic siren's consistently progressive pop agenda.
The tune is no mere soundtrack either but a magnificent, sultry,
pneumatic trip-soul ballad which gently blooms into a magical garden
of fluttering harps and shivering strings. It's also the closest
Björk has come to replicating the sensual majesty of her
early hit 'Play Dead'. All she needs now is for some tabloid
moralist to call for the video to be banned and a chart-topping
smash awaits. Fingers crossed.
Sand
Displane
(Satellite)
ATL
(I've Got A) Telescope
(Rotator)
Two dissident indie combos from a benighted outpost of civilisation
where dissonant ugliness reigns supreme: Oxford, in other words.
Sand make the sort of racket that avant-garde arts institutes use to
soundtrack 'challenging' multi-media installations made from donkey
shit and menstrual blood. Not that it's total wank, mind, more like
the broody clenched fist of blaring feedback and rolling breakbeats
you might expect to result from Add N To (X) hacking
Spiritualized into throbbing pink mince with a blunt
industrial chainsaw. Something of a hoot.
ATL, aka Arthur Turner's Lovechild, are
included here chiefly because of the opening joke on their press
release: "We're just making music for other people and if we like
it, it's a bonus." Nice one. Their lyrics might border on the
crapola ("pretend you're a music journalist just discovering
punk") but their naked, shivering, guitar'n'strings sound calls
to mind the haunted rural angst of prime-time Violent Femmes.
Behind the defensive humour, some interesting noises may just be
brewing.
Blondie
Nothing Is Real But The Girl
(RCA)
First loves never die, they say, and crikey, did I love
Blondie when I was 13. So yeah, it is heartening to learn
that their recent comeback album shifted a million copies in just
three weeks and that the band play their first UK arena shows later
this month. Only a mean-minded poltroon would begrudge such a
spectacular rebirth, but only a cloth-eared android could pretend
that 'Nothing Is Real...' is anything more than
genetically-modified Blondie substitute cloned from the
leftover DNA of their immortal sex-disco ancestors. First loves
never die, they just go a bit mouldy around the edges.
Experimental Pop Band
Punk Rock Classic
(City Slang)
The archly titled junk-funk excursions of deadpan Bristolians
EPB are often frustratingly lightweight but occasionally
touched by genius. Their latest offering finds Davey Woodward
paying blank-voiced tribute to an eccentric object of desire ("I
love a girl who smokes a pipe") while his rhythm buddies do
their best to recreate Trio's nifty novelty Krautpop
smasheroo 'Da Da Da' on guitars and kazoos. Unassuming and
strangely hypnotic.
No Doubt
New
(Higher Ground)
Sugar Ray
Every Morning
(East West)
Two ebullient escapees from southern California's evergreen ska-pop
scene. Written for the acclaimed new drug-heist comedy Go by
Swingers director Doug Liman, No Doubt's first
single for two years is a breathless slam-pop gallop which never
quite evolves into a fully-fledged tune.
Sugar Ray, on the other hand, already have a surefire US pop
smash in the form of 'Every Morning', a dangerously addictive
scratch'n'ska singalong bounce which should be lodged high in the
charts by the time you read this. It's hideously conservative
commercial product, of course, but still 50 times more 'new' and
'radical' than the New Radicals.
The Wiseguys
Ooh La La
(Wall Of Sound)
Two words for you: Budweiser advert. This is the hyperactive
big-beat cheese explosion which soundtracks those beer-drinking
frogs and their crocodile mate and, yes indeed, it is pure genius.
Imagine Supergrass without their brooding intellectual
depths, or Fatboy Slim without his thought-provoking
philosophical lyrics. Put simply: if you don't like this, you don't
like pop music. In which case, get thee to a nunnery with all the
other Belle & Sebastian fans.
Reef
Sweety
(S2)
Hard to love but impossible to actively dislike, the yak-lunged
hippy-metal knob-flashers of Olde Glastonbury Town here downshift
into (relatively) reflective mode as human Viz character
Gary Stringer The Hairy Singer delivers a tender stool-rock
strum suffused with folky, poppy, sun-bronzed good vibes. Destined
to be roared along to by thousands of stoned revellers at every
festival in the summer and then instantly forgotten which is some
kind of songwriting genius.
Cuban Boys
Blueprint For Modernisation EP
(ORG)
The band that (almost) everyone is calling the KLF of
acid-house cowpunk push their zany side as far as it can go with
this six-track singles-club collection. From the line-dancing
'Cotton Eye Joe' hoedown of 'Foggy Mountain Breakdown'
to the happy hardcore gallop through their conceptual '70s
glam-stomp pisstake 'Oh My God! They've Killed Kenny', the
emphasis is on sniggering silliness rather than creative wit. The
Boys are clearly bursting with ideas and attitude, they just need to
channel them more effectively.
Afrika Bambaataa & Westbam
Agharta City Of Shamballa
(Mute)
This meeting of minds sounded pretty damn funky at last year's Love
Parade, when Bambaataa and his unlikely Zulu Nation cousin
Westbam were spotting UFOs over Berlin from a float in the
middle of Europe's biggest ever rave. Shamballa, you see, is
an alien civilisation at the centre of our earth which is hollow,
obviously, and clearly stranded somewhere in 1986. But this studio
version inevitably loses something in translation, a somewhat
sterile electro-rap shimmer which rolls along smoothly but never
quite arrives anywhere.
Still, at least the PF Project mix shows spunk, adding
Toytown punk guitars and happy-house momentum to the overly sedate
original.
Feeder
Insomnia
(Echo)
Muse
Uno
(Mushroom)
Feeder are one of those eternally average guitar acts,
failing to match even the everyday heroics of Stereophonics
but lacking the will or wit to subvert their rigid indie-rock
formula with inventive diversions into arty weirdness. Thus,
'Insomnia' qualifies as perfect Evening Session
filler, its blamming riffola and ersatz teenage angst plugging the
three-minute gap between Therapy? and 3 Colours Red.
If you want a vision of Feeder's future, imagine an early
afternoon slot on the main stage at Reading forever.
West Country misfits Muse, meanwhile, have just come off tour
with Feeder. 'Uno' puts a slightly more compelling
spin on similar indie ingredients, being a twisted tango lament
played with venomous savagery and brimming with small-town rage.
Berating the girl who had the temerity to break his heart,
Matthew Bellamy howls and sobs like Thom Yorke at his
most turbulent, and the end result is pretty fine. Muse give
morbid introspection a good name.
Plutonik
Londinium
(Integrity)
Someone finding new uses for drum'n'bass is Plutonik, a
Midlands collective who submerge their supple junglist beats in the
chocolatey Julie London-ish jazz-soul vocals of Chrissy Van
Dyke. Polished and assured, this humid little elegy to a city in
crisis treads the line between retro-chic novelty single and ace
'90s torch song. Whatever happened to Carmel?
Rae & Christian
Swansong For A Nation
(Grand Central)
Third single from one of the most highly recommended word-of-mouth
albums of the past 12 months, 'Northern Sulphuric Soul', and
the well is clearly far from dry yet. 'Swansong...' unfolds
like a slow-motion panorama at twilight, carried along by
understated soul and unfinished sympathy. The shimmering ambi-dub
deconstruction by Two Lone Swordsmen is another low-voltage gem too.
Perhaps now would be an opportune time to forgive Rae &
Christian for working on the Texas album.
Jori Hulkonnen
Detach Yourself
Alexkid
Soul College
(both F Communications)
More summery disco-house candidates, hatched in various corners of
Europe but released by breezily cool Parisian label F
Communications. Finland's Hulkonnen rides a stylish, sassy,
samba-fuelled groove on 'Detach Yourself' while
Alexkid strolls through every style going from jazz to funk
to orchestral trip-hop on 'Soul College'. The only nagging
suspicion with records this smooth is that they harbour secret
ambitions to become the Brand New Heavies a sick desire
which must be thwarted at all costs, of course.
Art Of Noise
Metaforce
Leilani
Do You Want Me?
(both ZTT)
Oh yes, even in 1999 we have time for Art Of Noise's
clever-dick journeys into sound via Paul Morley's anal
passage great pop music doesn't have to be all dancing crocodiles,
you know. High-minded conceptual pop art we applaud, but dressing up
middlebrow studio noodling in the robes of high-minded conceptual
pop art is another story altogether.
Taken from AON's semi-biographical tribute album to Claude
Debussy, if you please, 'Metaforce' finds old-skool
rapper Rakim laying down rhymes about Baudelaire and
perfumed French gardens over string-kissed electro beats. In theory,
an inspired marriage of classical and pop idioms. In reality,
Nigel Kennedy's arse.
Thus it falls to AON's teen-queen labelmate Leilani to show
her greying, textbook-addled bosses how great pop works. Because
'Do You Want Me?' is a stupid-fresh, insanely catchy,
sugar-coated elasto-pop classic full of barking dogs and helium
harmonies. There is even a shimmery remix sounding uncannily like
Madonna's 'Ray Of Light' to keep the grown-ups happy.
On this evidence Leilani is the trainer-bra Betty Boo, the
anti-Billie. Bring on the dancing crocodiles, we say.
Sensurround
No White Clouds In My Blue Sky
(EC)
DJ Cartman
Disco Pulpo
(Grow)
Just when you feel like giving up on house music, along come
Basement Jaxx to inject a little fruity fun into the flagging
beats. And these two easy-breezy tunes keep the revival going, each
as slight as a summer breeze but both effortlessly catchy and
sun-kissed little numbers all the same.
Dutch duo Sensurround have the edge with their soft and downy
paean to endless azure skies. Cartman's stuck-needle
glitter-disco twinkle clearly has designs on the Stardust market,
but is equally hard to dislike.
Two mighty fine featherlight fresh-air grooves to help pretend you
are on a beach in Ibiza, even if you are stuck in a bedsit in
Newport Pagnell.
Mu-Ziq
Royal Astronomy EP
(Planet Mu)
A very limited-edition 12" which, to be blunt, you probably won't be
able to track down and which proves entirely misleading about the
direction of µ-Ziq's forthcoming album of the same title.
Although the LP mostly finds Mike Paradinas transforming
himself into the Michael Nyman of bleeps and breakbeats,
these two cuts showcase his more familiar abrasive side.
'The Motorbike Track' is a revved-up junglist bastard
brimming with distorted riffs and hardcore rap samples while
'Burst Your Arm' is a nagging, needling, nasty trawl through
the acid-techno gutter. The latter is a non-album rarity and, as
such, worth hearing if you can find it.
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JAMES OLDHAM
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