A bunch of years ago a friend of mine was with me at a record store and convinced me to buy this. He has convinced me to buy a lot of things over the years, most of them turned out to be pretty good. Unlike many of those he has not stopped asking about this album. This persistence, combine with some pretty intense album art, has built up my expectations for this album over the years. This album is actually one of the ones I have most been looking forward to finally digging into over the course of this project. Before I tell you how it went, some background.
Black Grape was formed by two former members of a group called the Happy Mondays. If you haven’t heard of them, don’t feel too bad, neither had I. In the early 90s they had a few huge hits before breaking up in a cloud of ego and drug abuse. This was during the period where England had missed getting into Nirvana, and was instead busy catching up on 80s dance music, and thus the Happy Mondays sound like nothing but a British version of the Funky Bunch being fronted by the dude from The Fall. They’re kind of fun, but its going to take a lot more of this very nice Polish Ale before I get used to asthmatic British dudes with sinus infections trying to rap.
Anyway, the deal with the Happy Mondays was that they were kind of super generic, but they made fun dance music in a period which approved of fun dance music, but had a lyricist who was really clever. This was kind of a zeitgeist thing, as the scene they came out of in Manchester would go on to mature and evolve into Big Beat, which I love, but they were far from the Chemical Brothers at this stage. The Happy Mondays gained a reputation as very clever, again, largely based on the lyrics, which when combine with the general druggie atmosphere at the time led to the usual inflated egos and drug addiction and yeah I mentioned that. So, the band breaks up, the front man goes through detox, and then reforms the band with a new name in order to cleanly break from his old life into his new life.
Except the rest of the band didn’t come along. Ryder, the lead singer, managed to hold onto the band dancer, brought in a guitarist from another defunct Manchester band, found a drummer, and brought on two rappers. Note the lack of a bassist in a dance group. So this is like if Dicky Barrett reformed the Bosstones as a post addiction soap box, but could only convince Ben Carr to sign on. What does it sound like? They sound like the Funky Bunch being fronted by a tone deaf homeless man shrieking over canned pop. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t unlistenable; to the contrary they are pretty good at holding the attention of the listener. But they do it through canned clichés ripped off from other, better artists. This hook is from the Beatles, that one from REM. The vocals are terrible, except when the rappers hack in there. They are pretty ok, as is the bassist, who is a studio musician. The drumming is fucking elementary. I seriously throught it was a poorly programmed drum machine until I read the credits. The lyrics are clever, but the vocals are so bad you can’t understand them through all the blood pouring out of your ears.
The only artist on here who is possibly talented is the guitarist, but he is being backed by a room full of monkeys, so he does what any guitarist would do when not constrained by anything but a very rudimentary beat. He noodles. He noodles low, he noodles high, he shows off all his very special jazz-funk guitar tricks. He noodles for all forty minutes of the album. On quiet nights in Manchester you can still hear him, noodling away, eating his noodles to keep up his strength. It is possible that scientists may one day be able to harness him for clean energy, but until then all he will do is make the neighborhood cats horny.
I suppose I should say some nice stuff about this album because it isn’t complete trash. The lyrics I could understand were kind of clever. There was some nice word play on occasion and some incisive social commentary, though very much in that special, 80s artist who cleaned up and now wants you to stay in school kind of way. I will say the album isn’t boring, and not even in a painful kind of way. There may be people out there who really like this album and I can understand how. You may need to be into Jam Bands. But this is not my thing. I found this album to be very unjustifiably self satisfied, and I am going to be getting rid of it.
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