ALBUMS

Rip It Up, Issue 236, 1 April 1997, Page 27

ALBUMS

BRESSA GREETING CAKE Bressa Creating Cake (Flying Nun) After teasing us with an endless string of sublime demos, Bressa Greeting Cake how deliver their selftitled debut album. Dripping with luxurious, if somewhat shambolic, pop masterpieces, the album traverses a pastoral-pop landscape with just a whiff of psychedelia in the air. From the opening ‘Palm Singing’, which sounds like Robert Smith after an overdose of Prozac, the album swings through a succession of highlights. ‘You And I’, with its dou-ble-tracked vocals, recalls late 60s Kinks in both sound and tone. Likewise, the spirit of Ray Davies hangs heavy over the whimsical and irreverent ‘A Chip That Sells Millions’. The twisted wreckage of ‘Superstation’ is the result of a headon collision between white-boy funk and Captain Beefheart, while ‘Zenax’, with its backdrop of chirping cicadas and a dripping tap, suggests the rustic side of XTC. The album perhaps loses a little focus over-the middle stages, but the run down the home straight to the finish line is long and impressive. The monumental ‘Papa People’ is followed by ‘Rocky Mountain’ an industry in-joke as charming as it is hummable. ‘An Early Microscope’ turns an unlikely premise into a gorgeous song, while ‘Peyton Farquhar’ has more winning melodies than it knows what to do with. The album closes triumphantly with ‘Wood for Her’ — a compelling study on the duality of love as both creator and destroyer, sung with a sly wink and set to a rollicking back beat.

The inspired hotchpotch of ideas and influences employed on this debut spews forth in a seemingly endless torrent that, on occasion,

threatens to overwhelm the listener. Bressa are the sort of band who’ll throw in a weird chord, sound, or rhythm, just because they feel a song may be following too predictable a path. While some may label Bressa as too damn quirky for their own good, I applaud their sense of musical adventure and errant genius. MARTIN BELL NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS The Boatman’s Call (Mute) After scaring the weens and elderlies under the covers with their last album, Murder Ballads, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have returned in a much mellower mood which could almost get them forgiveness in those quarters (if it weren’t for the odd ‘useless old fucker’, ‘twinkling cunt’, and the like). This one won’t haunt your dreams, but oh, the things it’ll do to those lonesome waking hours. Leading off with the first- single, ‘lnto My Arms’, is all The Boatman’s Call needs to do to get you into a seat and snuffling into your hanky — where you’ll stay for the next dozen songs if you have an ounce of genuine feeling in your body. Simplicity is the essence (most perfectly distilled in ‘Black Hair’), and you’ll be surprised to hear how little racket eight grown men can make while giving you so much. The most in your face things ever get is in the overlaid vocal of the closing ‘Green Eyes’, which tends to surprise one out of the cloud of revery, lest it be allowed down low enough to actually obscure the issue: that a broken heart won’t kill you is the cruelest thing about it, but that’s only ’cause a brimming one can bring such holy joy to even the surliest old shit. BRONWYN TRUDGEON

SPEARHEAD Chocolate Supa Highway (Capitol) The problem with the last Spearhead album, if any, was it was too damn good. Jazzy, funky, fresh vibes that heaped on the herb. It made you so ravenous you listened and listened and got a bit sick of it too quickly. So, following that logic I’m assuming Chocolate Supa Highway will grow on me as time goes on, because initially it’s not nearly as appealing. Laxed-out, spliffed-up. Touring with the Fugees obviously had an R&B effect on Michael Franti. And as he’s looked more to soul and reggae for inspiration, his bassy growls have jumped down a couple of octaves into Barry White territory. “Sounds great,” you say. And on the surface it is. The single ‘Why Oh Why’ is an easy lead in for Home fans. The collaboration with Stephen Marley on ‘Rebel Music’.is inspired. ‘Cornin’ to Gitcha’ is a liquid lovergroove, and ‘Gas Gauge’ is as moving as anything Franti’s done. But his groundbreaking Disposable Hero hip-hop history seems to have been

totally erased. Like it never happened. You can’t whinge too much when the impassioned punk turns into the professional craftsman, I suppose. The concepts are still there (Chocolate Supa Highway is Franti’s idea that hip-hop is the black Internet), but the music has been commercially doctored to appeal to the palates of the masses. And they’ll, love it. • . JOHN TAITE WILCO Being There (Reprise) Wilco emerged from the ashes of Uncle Tupelo, a band always credited with having led country into the 90s, moving through punk, Seattle, and whatever passed for the crackle of rock ’n’ roll energy along the way. On Being There, vocalist/guitarist and writer Jeff Tweedy has hit a prolific patch productive enough to turn this album into a nineteen-track double CD that, remarkably enough, scarcely puts a foot wrong. Tweedy’s stated intention was to revel in his influences and incorporate them into

his own almost flawless, intuitve grasp of what makes great country and rock ’n’ roll. His heroes are mainly second and third generation American outsiders — loners like Alex Chilton and his disciple, the Replacements’ Paul Westerburg, whose spirit guides the wracked, fractured brilliance of ballads like ‘Misunderstood’, ‘Far, Far Away’ and ‘Sunken Treasure’. In country terms it’s hard to avoid the pervasive presence of Gram Parsons, and his memory is certainly rekindled by songs as moving as ‘The Lonely’,

leaving the Stones to provide the rock ’n’ roll inpsiration fro ‘Monday’ and the dixie roll of ‘Dreamer in My Dreams’. So, Tweedy makes his point, that rock ’n’ roll in the 90s can still be an inevitable synthesis of its past, especially if you choose to work with its traditional elements, as he does. Yet, it’s , this debt to tradition and Tweedy’s own ability at combining this with his own considerable talent that makes Being There the outstanding album it is. GEORGE KAY