The Cardigans third album revealed a band on a creative downward spiral. When they first appeared they were a breath of fresh air with each new release displaying unique pop sensibilities. While they hadn’t quite hit the dirge of say a band like Texas yet, their sound has become somewhat paralysed. The 2 singles 'Erase and Rewind' and 'My Favourite Game' flatter to deceive. The latter was needlessly played to death on the radio and MTV. Initially it was a sweet burst of melody and energy but like low-grade sugar it can sometimes leave a bad taste in the mouth if overused. That chunky guitar riff is quite addictive but after a time it does begin to grate. Good music needs to be handled with care, use sparingly and over time you'll appreciate it more.

'Erase and Rewind' takes a little while to sink into consciousness and when it does it turns out to be remarkably slight. Ok it could pass for nice background music in your local coffee-house but outside of this it is quite dull, lifeless and has some of the most inane lyrics imaginable. The Cardigans have it in them to conjure lots of pretty little tunes like 'Rise and Shine' but stuff like 'Erase and Rewind' sees them take a step backwards in order to appeal to an ambivalent public. Elsewhere 'Starter' is just short of middle of the road, pity that, as a spot of road kill would have saved us from its limp application. I just can't stand lazy music and this song is the Cardigans letting a somewhat malfunctioning autopilot take the controls. 'Marvel Hill' is deceptively enjoyable but its attractive kooky weirdness is ruined by a risible but overwhelming foghorn sound that runs right through it.

Gran Turismo is not a complete failure however. 'Explode' has a beautiful forlorn quality. Nina Persson's voice is crystal clear and sympathetic and the backing instruments sound gorgeously out of time. 'Hanging Around ' is repackaged Garbage (the band) but at least it has a certain oomph that is lacking elsewhere on the album. Persson's morning skylark vocals are an enjoyable feature on all Cardigans releases but here they don't come close to saving the day because more often than not the guffaw that surrounds them is too safe. 'Higher', for example, is just so twee, the accompanying sounds so risible you'd imagine they were generated by a third party gently using the hand of the sleeping guitarist to strum the strings of his guitar.

What disappoints most about Gran Turismo is that it sounds so sickly produced and packaged. It's a bit too wet behind the ears, like the band were usurped by their marketing department's sales aspirations. The album certainly gave the Cardigans a larger audience but this compromise means that the lively spark that defined their early recordings has been quenched. If you are still into the cassette format and own this album, make a copy of the remnants of quality and then rewind and erase.

Rating: 4/10

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‘We’ve made some pretty messy records’, says Stuart Murdoch, ringleader of the cirque du soleil that is Belle and Sebastian, on 2003’s ‘Fans Only’ DVD. This comes a minute after a mission statement of sorts, as Murdoch grasps for the words to describe why he started the band: a desire to ‘make the most tuneful, lush sounding records imaginable’. For ten years now, while throwing out more tuneful, catchier songs than anyone else, the band has also been edging along the taut tightrope from messy to lush. Their early records are laden with lisping voices, faint strings, tinny brass and background fuzz. In short, they sound like precious lost recordings from the early seventies, with careworn dents and scratches that fall just to the charming side of shambolic: Murdoch’s voice breaking on the demo version of ‘The State I Am In’, or unzipping his cardigan during the intro to ‘Expectations’. Albums number three and four moved toward lush, layered pop, taking in new instruments and influences: the bagpipes on ‘Sleep The Clock Around’, the crisp harpsichord on ‘The Model’, and the Northern Soul vibe of ‘Dirty Dream #2’. The giant step came in 2000, with the single ‘Legal Man’. Advertised by the band as, ‘like Dirty Dream #2, but dirtier’, its congas, organ, sitar and dirty big kick-off riff matched against daft lyrical innuendo, a snappy chorus and, crucially, beefed up production, so that ‘Legal Man’ sounded more like a chart record than anything the band had ever done. It made the top twenty, and landed them on Top Of The Pops. It was no flash in the pan, either. Their next single, ‘Jonathan David’ followed in a similar vein, all high tempo and cheesy organ, and their last album, 2003’s ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’ showed a change from the chamber music of yore, with stuff like ‘Step Into My Office Baby’ (more innuendo) and ‘I’m a Cuckoo’ (more big riffs). Now we get ‘The Life Pursuit’, six fine albums in (not counting the collections of EP’s and singles or the half-baked soundtrack), and there may be no going back; the tightrope has been crossed.

We arrive at a classroom. There is a girl daydreaming her worries away. This is what you might call Belle and Sebastian playing on their home turf, with a biblical lesson and a wink to androgyny to boot. Despite the poppy songwriting style and delivery, there is a familiar ring to the line-up of props and characters throughout the album. There are, as you can expect on their records, kids with troubles at home. There are punks, tea and gin, religion, kinky s*x and a launderette. Again, there are a few songs stylised after other bands (‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’ dropped a nod to Thin Lizzy and The Clash amongst others) with some very 80’s sounds on the excellent ‘We Are The Sleepyheads’ and on ‘Song For Sunshine’ with its Cocteau Twins pastiche of a chorus. And, as usual, they’ve lodged the odd swear word to keep you on your toes, especially where an expletive is buried in a benign, milky ditty, like a landmine in a meadow.

Another thing you can always count is for Belle and Sebastian (or more accurately, their songs’ protagonists) to be is refreshingly uncool - at times provincial or mawkish or just plain tripped up by puberty. On ‘The Blues Are Still Blue’, Murdoch is still acting the gauche schoolkid (‘I got a letter from my mamma which my stoopid dog has ate’) but the song is dressed up in funky threads, and moves with a swagger and confidence in a way it could gatecrash David Bowie’s ‘Hunky Dory’ and get away with it. You sense the band is having more fun and taking chances. It’s a marked change for Murdoch to sing ‘I left my lady at the launderette’ - he’d never have called his girl his ‘lady’ before, it would have been a hint at a liaison with a wallflower named Jean or Jane or Mary Jo. Now he’s Sly Stone, and somehow his girl is doing his washing.

‘The Blues Are Still Blue’ is released as a single this week, and it would be my first pick as a single from the album, with its clever, simple, singable chorus and ‘proper’ guitar solo. There are plenty of contenders, though; ‘The Life Pursuit’ plays like a singles collected and most of the songs wouldn’t sound out of place on morning radio. Even the chorus-less ‘Another Sunny Day’ could qualify by virtue of its relentless pep, as could ‘For The Price Of a Cup Of Tea’, which shows that as their song titles approach self-parody, they still play it for kicks with the ‘If She Wants Me’ style skank, and the quintessential Belle and Sebastian lyric, unhip but fun, ‘For the price of a cup of tea, you’d get a line of coke’.

‘Funny Little Frog’, the single which warmed us all for the winter, and the other similarly chirpy and danceable songs are accessible and immediate, but after a few spins, we will call for something more substantial past all the froth. The straight narratives of ‘Sukie in the Graveyard’ and ‘White Collar Boy’ lack the poetic fractured lyrics of, say, ‘Dress Up In You’, one of the more traditional Belle and Sebastian tunes here, with its trumpets and milquetoast ‘Nice Day For a Sulk’ bob. Despite the abundance of chipper chart material on this album, their forté remains bittersweet songs, like the achingly pretty ‘To Be Myself Completely’ and its expressive violin melody, or like ‘Mornington Crescent’ which brings the album to a stirring close, with a sweet guitar and piano break, around which Murdoch drops vignettes suffused with guilt over a laid-back Sunday morning beat, sketching a scene with effortless turn of phrase, alert to everyday details and moments of anticipation, drawing anxiety out of a pregnant pause.

On Belle and Sebastian’s 1999 EP ‘This Is Just a Modern Rock Song’ (notable for the stunning ‘Slow Graffiti’), Murdoch sung on the muddy lead track, ‘we’re not terrific but we’re competent’. It was an excellent joke, as the truth was, of course, the other way around. For better or worse though, it now looks as if cold competency has crept up on the band, and we’re lumped with it. We should have seen it coming, though. Murdoch gave us another clue on ‘Fans Only’, ‘‘You look at each other and you think, come on, let’s make a fabulous sounding record this time. Let’s make a record that’s as good as, y’know, ‘Make Me Smile’ by Cockney Rebel or ‘Marquee Moon’ by Television’. This is it.

Rating: 8/10

Tony Kelleher
03.04.2006


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Ash's image as precocious teenagers was a hard one to dispel. While they moved into their twenties with this album their tunes continued into an adolescent vein. There is nothing wrong with this of course; it's just that an album of full sugar sweet pop can sometimes grate. Perhaps the biggest hurdle Ash have to overcome was the suspicion that many of their best tunes are quite throwaway. They tend to be pleasing on the ear for an initial period but somehow lose their charm over time. The cause is their direct approach to song writing. The effect is legions of admirers but a distinct lack of devoted followers. Take 'Shining Light' for example. This is a superb, buoyant pop song with a crystal clear chorus and several notable guitar moments. What more could you ask for, you might ask? Well, for one, in order for music to endure it must reach the parts other tunes don't. While not completely formulaic, Ash's music largely follows the angle they forged back in their 'Trailer' days. 'Candy' is a case of a song way past its grow up date; the strings sound artificial and unnecessary and the vocal delivery is just too tired to be affecting. This is dross and should really have fallen down one of the cracks in the studio floor.

Elsewhere Tim Wheeler has better success. 'Submission' has full on Primal Scream tendencies. You almost expect the singer to breathe Kowalski but of course he doesn't. There is a darker plot at work that provides some solace from the stomach retching happiness elsewhere. 'Someday' is also quite neat, even if there is a drafty hollow lurking at its core. The subtle string arrangements are welcome but overall it's a little too loose to really land a sucker punch. With a bit more work this could have been much better. The power pop continues unabated on 'Pacific Palisades'. The drumming is manic and while we're on the subject I have to say that Rick McMurray, Ash's drummer, really gets on my nerves. He just seems out of sorts in the rock and roll scheme of things. I always get the feeling he should be holding a petrol pump rather than a drumstick. I know this sounds cruel and I guess to be fair to him he was there with that shambolic hairstyle well before David Beckham.

'Burn Baby Burn' is the quintessential shiny pop song that Ash hold the patent on. Bleeding glorious jangling riffs through Wheelers vocal onslaught succeeds in raising the pulse. 'Walking Barefoot' also pushes all the right buttons and lends a touching reminder of those long summer days as a child. It's about as grand as Ash get without sounding out of their depth. 'Sometimes' is superbly fresh; the fine guitar barrage never drowns out Wheeler's melodic vocals. 'Nicole' is also hugely impressive. It takes its cue from alt Americana and friskily appears at the other end with distinction. 'There's A Star' completes a treble of strong tracks. Big, bold and fulfilling its own huge aspiration, nothing else on the album really comes close. Free All Angels is let down by 'World Domination', the final track. It's an aimless punk rock workout that puts a shabby seal on the album. It doesn't quite leave a bad taste in the mouth but that let down feeling is hard to dispel.

'Free All Angels' proved that Ash needed to reset their musical compass. Their undoubted talent would see them better served down avenues that don't rely on teenage observations (listen to the childish romp that is 'Cherry Bomb' and you'll see what I mean). Four albums and still peddling the same subject matter tends to turn people off. A new direction would see the band flourish. On the positive side given the talent on offer worldwide domination will come. 'Free All Angels' is good fare and taken in moderation it will certainly brighten up your day. A success in anybody's book then.

Rating: 5/10



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