ALBUM REVIEWS

Filewile
BLUESKYWELL
MOUTH WATERING RECORDS 9.11.09
@www.vanguard-online.co.uk


This lot look totally off their collective trolleys on the cover of this album – dressed up in a range of crazy outfits, acting out what look like madcap Monty Python style skits. The band also have fantastically whacky names – the singer is called Joy Frempong and the bass player Mago Flueck. Now, maybe Frempong and Flueck are the equivalent of Smith or Jones in their native Switzerland but you really couldn’t make this up. The music is just as off its rocker – all unhinged bleeps and bloops, awkward, jerky rhythms and weird samples.

This is the follow-up to the band’s debut album ‘Nassau Massage’ and supposedly marks a progression from a duo messing about with laptops to the sound of a more expansive full scale band. But song titles like ‘Sombrero or Die’, ‘Kick The Spacedrum’ and ‘Balaton Soupdrink’ are hardly the stuff of instant accessibility and the experimental tone is difficult to get a handle on.

I’m sure creating this album must have been riotous fun – and it must give the contributors a huge sense of liberating creative freedom to come up with stuff as off the wall as this. But the end product is mostly unlistenable to, except for a few of the more toned down tracks – the title track for instance is a fairly chilled out dub driven piece which has some merit, and ‘Iron Lady’ also has a nice feel to it – there’s a cool keyboard loop and cutting back and forth between sweet female vocals and a rap from Brooklyn based RQM. He also features on closing track ‘Codeine’ which is probably the best track on the album, and shows that if they can write a decent recognisable tune, and not just mash together a bunch of weird noises then they can come up with engaging and agreeable music.

But the rest is just a jumbled incoherent mess. Their press blurb indicates that they dabble in the psychedelic and experimental but without being just weird. Now I like to think I’m fairly broad-minded when it comes to sampling new and interesting music – I’ll try anything really, but for me on most of this album they’re just being weird for weirdness’ sake.

Steve Claire

www.filewile.com