Any singer who can land a blow on their lyrical rival by calling them a ‘doughtnut’ has to be worthy of further investigation. It’s not right, it’s not nice, use your brain. Cut back on the booze and the drugs, especially cocaine. It’s not what you expect from a street-wise boy from Camden to say, but that’s what makes it so great. It subverts every expectation you could possibly throw at it. It’s not grime, it’s not rap, it’s not techno, it’s not indie, and it’s not, I’m pleased to say, some stodgy and over conceptualised amalgam of all four. It just is what it is, a cheerful, carefree knee-jerk response to the music that we love, chopped-up, sliced-up, mishmashed and served up with flashes of astonishing humour. Hot Chip achieve a similar kind of balance, and to a lesser degree the Infadels, but it’s all derived from the same source: a passionate love of ‘toons’ of all races, with no snobbery, no pretensions and none of the purile, pseudo nonsense we’ve come to associate with mouthy, urban tourists like Lilly Allen and Kate Nash. It’s a simple enough proposition: flashes of The Specials, The Streets, Ian Dury re-energised with the sparkly shock horror of scratchy 80’s electro, techno, calypso, 50s doo-wop, 2-step revival and ska. Chipper cautionary tales with a bootful of optimism and the kind of gas that inflates balloons: boozed up boys in city centres, violent loafer dramas, proud single dads and coping with a life held vicariously together by no end of little white fibs. But what did you expect from such a lightweight country?
It’s cracking debut, quietly recalling the saucy and uncomplicated jiggery-pokery of an early V-flicking Beck. Fun and frothy.
Download:
’Booze’ – Brass stabs, loafers, birds, booze, and more squidgey, beepy, 80s retro than an entire series of Ashes to Ashe.
‘Oh My Gosh’ – Mating ritual for acid dropping robots with crashing Asian beats. Bop. Bop. Bop.
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