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| Track List: 1. Something's Rotten In The Back Of Iceland 2. RSVP 3. Tommy Walsh's Eco House 4. Joy In Leeuwarden (We Are Ready) 5. Excavating Rita 6. Fun Day In The Park 7. Descent Of The Stiperstones 8. Left Lyrics In The Practice Room 9. L'Enfer C'est Les Autres 10. Fix It So She Dreams Of Me 11. The Coroner's Footnote 12. Rock And Roll Is Full Of Bad Wools Running time: 38 minutes Released: 2011 |
Aha! After a few albums I did not enjoy much, this is pure pleasure.
I cannot recall why I picked this up, whim I think, but I am very glad I did. It has received a fair bit of car-play in the last few years, only coming out in the last couple of months.
The only thing I knew about HMHB before buying it was that the late lamented John Peel (whose posthumous semi-auto biography I read earlier this year) liked them a lot, as did someone on a forum I frequent.
What I did not know included the talent for amusing stories in song form, wry humour that suits my sense of fun (hence the comedy tag; it is not a comedy album), dark tales delivered in a melodic and accomplished manner. I did not know about celeb references, twee murder ballads, necrophilia, korfball or selfish suicides. The tracks are all rather short but each recounts a scene that is vivid, and imagined to music that is far more tuneful than I had expected.
Yeah, the singing is not the best, but when everything else is so perfectly set up I can look past that easily. Any lyric that includes "jump off the roof of Dignitas" is definitely my sort of thing.
Joy in Leeuwarden (aka the korfball song) is probably the only one I do not really like on the album. It is a little... bland and the rolling guitars do not do it for me enough to cover the slightly dodgy harmonies in the vocal. That, though, is the worst I can say about anything on this disc. It is one of those where you press play then smile until it is done. There is an odd moment in Excavating Rita when I think it morphs into The Trickster (from Radiohead's My Iron Lung E.P.) which I do not remember but otherwise I find myself without too much to say about each track as they pass through, washing over my ears... I just like listening to this more than thinking of something to say about it.
Some of the stories are actually really disturbing, horrifying even. They would be darkly comic but unpleasant if they were not delivered with such wit, charm and with a generally simple, but reasonably accomplished tune set to back them up. This is another reason why I think genre-tagging is meaningless: I could not categorise 90 Bisodol to my satisfaction if my life depended on it. I like that; it shifts around styles and whilst, yes, it is made by white boys with guitars, they are clever about it.
My favourite song on the album is The Coroner's Footnote, no question - the picture painted is complete, vivid and wraps up in a conclusion that might punch depending on your point of view.
I cannot recall why I picked this up, whim I think, but I am very glad I did. It has received a fair bit of car-play in the last few years, only coming out in the last couple of months.
The only thing I knew about HMHB before buying it was that the late lamented John Peel (whose posthumous semi-auto biography I read earlier this year) liked them a lot, as did someone on a forum I frequent.
What I did not know included the talent for amusing stories in song form, wry humour that suits my sense of fun (hence the comedy tag; it is not a comedy album), dark tales delivered in a melodic and accomplished manner. I did not know about celeb references, twee murder ballads, necrophilia, korfball or selfish suicides. The tracks are all rather short but each recounts a scene that is vivid, and imagined to music that is far more tuneful than I had expected.
Yeah, the singing is not the best, but when everything else is so perfectly set up I can look past that easily. Any lyric that includes "jump off the roof of Dignitas" is definitely my sort of thing.
Joy in Leeuwarden (aka the korfball song) is probably the only one I do not really like on the album. It is a little... bland and the rolling guitars do not do it for me enough to cover the slightly dodgy harmonies in the vocal. That, though, is the worst I can say about anything on this disc. It is one of those where you press play then smile until it is done. There is an odd moment in Excavating Rita when I think it morphs into The Trickster (from Radiohead's My Iron Lung E.P.) which I do not remember but otherwise I find myself without too much to say about each track as they pass through, washing over my ears... I just like listening to this more than thinking of something to say about it.
Some of the stories are actually really disturbing, horrifying even. They would be darkly comic but unpleasant if they were not delivered with such wit, charm and with a generally simple, but reasonably accomplished tune set to back them up. This is another reason why I think genre-tagging is meaningless: I could not categorise 90 Bisodol to my satisfaction if my life depended on it. I like that; it shifts around styles and whilst, yes, it is made by white boys with guitars, they are clever about it.
My favourite song on the album is The Coroner's Footnote, no question - the picture painted is complete, vivid and wraps up in a conclusion that might punch depending on your point of view.
At time of writing this is the only HMHB album I own... I should really look up more of their stuff.
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