BMX Bandits
53rd & 3rd Days CD
Avalanche. onlycd15.
by Keith McLachlan.
December 15, 1998.
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I like Frances BMX Bandit better
than Duglas BMX Bandit because Frances' side projects are much more
happening and he doesn't sing in the schlocky Scottish accent that Duggy
sometimes pulls out of his butt. But then Dug was the guiding light way
back when in 1986 when he and Sean 'Lovegod' Dickson put out infuriatingly
catchy tunes like 'Sad?' and 'Strawberry Sunday' proving you didn't need
to have any recognizable musical ability to make wonderful pop music.
Stephen Pastel knew this back then and so did the cool kids in 1986 surely. But me? Back then I might have still had a copy of Ratt's 'Invasion of Your Privacy' in my tape deck so I am happy happy these recordings are again seeing the light of day! Thank yous go to Avalanche Records, who once had the good taste to release Snapper records :).
It is all loving and sweet and charming and ridiculously wonderful! And wahey! They even covered 'What a Wonderful World' which ties in nicely with my attempts to review this record. All the records I am writing about today have lots of yellows in the cover art, is yellow the colour of love, your eye does have more yellow rods or cones or whatever than any other, it is probably true then cause I love this record!
BMX Bandits
Theme Park CD
Big Deal. 9048-2.
by Keith McLachlan.
December 28, 1997.
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Oh man, if I don't regain my
senses I may finish this review with the proclamation that this is the
album of the year! Why? Ummm....you know how it is when you are just
sitting there feeling all super smiley from seeing the High LLamas playing
live and you pop in a CD and man it just lifts your already buoyant
spirits into outer space?
No? Ok, well I am feeling incredibly chipper at the moment and so every jangle, every silly lyric about nuclear summertimes, building big hearts out of little ones and wanting to fall in love just sound much more profound than anything Noam Chomsky has ever committed to paper.
At those times you could understand the policies of Lionel Jospin. It is in these moments you recognize the necessity of the Food Channel. This is a record made for those gleeful times.
There are 18 songs here and even the two written by an ex-Soup Dragon are groovy. This has to be the party pleasing lp of the year, forget Cornershop, this is love, this is heart, this is soul.
Boards Of Canada
Geogaddi CD
by Keith Mclachlan.
March 10, 2002.
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Bored of Canada? I know that senitment well. As a
former Canadian myself I was required to spend a good
part of a good number of the summers of my youth in
our "aircraft carrier for terrorists" to the north.
This was in the 70s when Canadians still had
approximately 2 channels of television, milk in bags
and baseball cards where some of the stats were also
conveyed in French. Of course now all the stats are
in Franglais, and Canadian television still resembles
American television from 1959 although apparently it
is not illegal to steal direct-to-home satellite
television and many Canadians enjoy the trash on
American cable for free. Boards of Canada are from
Scotland then. But, they did spend some of their
youth in Calgary and thus the source of their name
which likely seeped out of their collective experience
as part of a repressed traumatization featuring
electrodes and animal rectums, silly cowpokes. It is
fashionable to say that not much has changed in Boards
of Canada's universe, that this is an extension of the
first album but as I only recently become a fan,
discovering 'Music Has a Right to Children' only a few
months ago I would have to say I disagree. There are
similarities for certain but whereas I find the first
album mining a single idea in each song until the vein
is completely depleted the new one is a bit more
expansive, it turns three or four different directions
in the span of a song. It also feels warmer, there is
less space, less of an alien feel, more of the
pastoral feel that everyone attributes to the first one
but i just don't hear. Geogaddi is long, but it is no
drawback because it feels less of a whole than the
first one, more like a compilation of exciting
moments. I haven't listened enough to pick out the
highlights, I still can't name any songs off of the
first one other than 'roygbiv' and I can only recall
it because it is the acronym for the colour spectrum
but I couldn't recognize it should it be playing right
here, right now. I guess that is my own hang-up with
instrumental music, familiarity, I listen to a
reasonable amount but I couldn't name a Roy Montgomery
song on listening or a Mum or a Boards of Canada song
either. Maybe I need to pay more attention but then
this is something near the equivalent of a sensory
deprivation tank, the lack of focus on lyrics allows
me to immerse myself deeper into the music and create
associations which are less conscious and more
visceral and that is rather lovely.
the Boo Radleys
C'Mon Kids CD
Creation.
by Keith McLachlan.
December 10, 1996.
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If you think Oasis are "da bomb" well then you probably have no use
for the Boo Radleys, but if you are like myself and you find Noel
Gallagher's rehash of the Beatles to be rather tepid and uninspiring
well then the Boos are salvation. Opening with one of their most
overtly rock songs ever, "C'mon Kids," this album is a rollercoaster
ride of thrills, chills and headspinning excitement. None of the
songs end where they started, only a couple have fewer than four or
five segments and the way that musical genres are visited in the span
of one song is mindnumbing. Take "Four Saints": in the span of
approximately 4 minutes (I have the vinyl, sorry, I don't know the
exact time) the Boos go from sunny melodic pop, to outright skree, to
a pseudo trip-hop leaning, back to melodic pop and finally conclude
with an aching outro bound to leave you all choked up. Then comes
"New Brighton Promenade" and you realize this carnival is loaded with
delights. Amazingly, most of the songs bear little resemblance to
others on the album and yet the record is neither disjointed or
confused. I am still in awe and it has been a couple of months. Write
your favorite British music mag and beg them to shoot Oasis and start
backing a winning horse, because in twenty years people will be
wondering why all the kids were so in love with "Wonderwall" when they
could have been listening to "C'mon Kids."
Clint Boon
Only One Way I Can Go CD
Rabid Badger. nang004cd.
by Keith McLachlan.
December 15, 1998.
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Oh no it is Clint Boon and his
horrible bowl hairdo!!! Erm does he still have the bowl cut? Actually I
have no idea but he does still have that groovee organ that infested all
of the Inspiral Carpets hits (come on admit you shared more than a few
spins around the dance floor with the Carpets) and with it Clint, on this
ep, bats a respectable .667. The title track opens and shah! it sounds
like an Inspiral Carpets reunion in full effect with Clint sounding a lot
like Tom Hingley.
Then comes track two which is quite possibly the worst idea ever imagined-a spoken word piece over dull listless tones done from the point of view of an Elvis fan and worse yet with either his wife or sister meaning it probably was done out of the goodness of his heart??? I mean the only thing this song proves is that there should be a law banning all future spoken word songs about Elvis Presley.
From this bleak valley though races an instrumental ray of hope called 'Tiger Woods: Astronaut' which should help to establish something that should have been painfully obvious to Clint after 'The Beast Inside' and that is that no one is ever gonna take him seriously so he should just stick to silly, happy pop songs.
Bouquet
Coral Kingdom CD
Popstar. pop cd1.
by Keith McLachlan.
January 9, 1999.
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Imagine, if you will, that Scott,
our fearless leader in this here tweekitten universe, if he were to stage
a twee battle of the bands! We, the members of tweekittendom, would attend
and the band's would show up and play at their most delicate and the
winner would be the band with the best cardigans, fewest eye contacts with
members of the audience and also having received the most polite applause
from the shy gaggle on hand.
Bouquet might be entered as Sheffield, England's representative and they would be fierce competition for such is the competence of their tweeness. Fey boy singer who sounds like the guy from Brighter, an incessant everlasting jangle to make your jello wiggle conjunctive with songtitles which incorporate words like eternity, sky, dream, sea and angels. The locals would be mighty intimidated by the foreign team from the premier division and we the citizens of tweekittendom, assuming we set aside our xenophobia, would be charmed right out of our Jack Purcells cause Bouquet is lovely, that and their back-up singers are named Elodie, Penny and Zoe.
Perhaps the contest would be a single elimination bracket tournament like the NCAA basketball tournament, for each round Bouquet would pull out another devastating turn of tweephrase or maybe the singer would flip his Frank and Walters circe 1992 haircut and twinkle his eyes behind his wiry glasses while wearing his favourite black turtleneck. They might be unstoppable! But of course might is the operative word for we may never know cause well Scott would probably rather buy the San Francisco Giants with all of his collected millions thus denying us all, we if you will, a chance to witness the charms of Bouquet, unless of course you buy 'Coral Kingdom' and stage your own tournament in the cozy confines of your bedroom!