ALBUM REVIEWS
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ALBUM REVIEWS |
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Japanther
TUT TUT NOW SHAKE YA BUTT TRUTH CULT Out now @www.vanguard-online.co.uk
It usually augers well when an album opens with cut & paste movie & TV speech dialogue. This looks to be a strange one – half “art project”, half band. And it flicks back and forth between strange outsider art and cutesy but punked up ditties. If New England waif Jonathan Richman turned the knobs to overload, he might sound like these songs. The opening song is a manifesto: “Someday you’ll be dead and gone but this won’t be over. So, let’s make something big and strong that will last”. It rides a wave of fuzzed-up distorto bass and echoing drums before giving way to another short but heartfelt song. There are a surprising number of love songs – like the subjection of “I Love You Wherever You Spend The Night” but deflected though a wild punk musical perspective. Things don’t get scary, more a lo-fi fuzzy volume-turning bag of noise. They all belt along with drums prominent, pushing and punching the lyrics till the bruises show. “Call me up and tell me you love me”, they ask. Spooky musical backdrops usher in strange tales of a traveller in Africa. Half poetry / half the sort of white-man-bamboozled-by-mystical-locals as might have been told by a sober Viv Stanshall’s Sir Henry Rawlinson. Instead it’s an epic by executive producer Penny Rimbaud – yup, the Crass drummer. And he drops in another – “I Thee Indigene” – largely accompanied, of course, by steady drums, in which he heads further towards the territory that would be occupied by the lovechild of Baudelaire and that old drunk explorer on The Fast Show. These pieces take up a good half of the album and I don’t begrudge them, it makes for a fabulously strange combo. The two faces of this album are completely mismatched and could as well be two separate EPs yet, strangely, it added up to a disparate but entertaining whole. It’s all arty and conceptual and silly and fun all at the same time. Recommended for smiles. www.southern.com |
