“lamb”
Lamb
Fear of Fours
Fontana/Mercury
“leomoon”
Leomoon
Leomoon
Topaz
Turn back, I beg of you, while you still can, there’s nothing here but broken promises, missed opportunities and so much worthless genre hopping. That’s addressed to you, the readers. To the bands, I have only to say: please stop playing this shit music and make some sort of worthwhile contribution like, say, a Motley Crue cover band. I made this perfectly clear when I attempted an objective review of the Weed record last month; my patience for these boy-girl/trip-hop/rip-off/mature-jungle/Portishead-stealing/Bjork-wanna-being bands has worn down to nothing at all.
So now I have to take the gloves off, my hand has been forced. What are the defining points of this genre? 1. Breathy, enigmatic, mysterious (read: “forced”) female vocals (usually painfully limited range) mixed WAY up at the front. 2. Purposely oblique lyrics that usually border on the laughably absurd. Leomoon’s contribution to this distinguished field is “Pepsi-Cola makes me sticky.” 3. Piss-poor hip-hop/lukewarm jungle/tepid sampling workouts courtesy of anonymous boy member of band. 4. Themes of longing and loss that will make you wish you were one of the robotic Kraftwerk puppets just to distance yourself as much as possible from these supposedly “shared” emotions. A genre destined for self-extinction by its own restrictive limitations. Yet it endures.
Listen, Tricky got it right, Portishead got it right, Massive Attack got it right, and that’s pretty much it. When was that? 1996? The 1996 revival continues. The Creatures are the ONLY late arrival to this field that I can even take seriously, so its funny that Lamb, in a desperate bid for self-survival, have added house elements and pretty much completely aped Siouxsie’s vocal performance from “Anima Animus.” But then, I’m sure they’d deny the whole thing. Lamb have sputtered out this second dismal record, and are coasting on the remixes, while Leomoon’s career is over before it even began, as far as I can tell. To conclude: the only audience for this watered-down, pseudo-dance, pantomime drum n’ bass nonsense is thirty-something couples who are trying to impress one another with their artsy-ness on the first date without offending the other’s delicate sensibilities. So when faced with listening to the soundtrack to polite but earnest conversation about, y’know, life and stuff, I’ll pass. More conservative than George W.