release date: Mar. 3, 2008
format: digital
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,62]
producer: Chumbawamba
label: No Masters - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 2. "Add Me" (live) - 4. "Hull or Hell" - 5. "El fusilado" (live) - 7. "I Wish That They'd Sack Me" - 11. "Lord Bateman's Motorbike" - 14. "(Words Flew) Right Around the World" - 18. "Compliments of Your Waitress" - 24. "Waiting for the Bus"
13th studio album by Chumbawamba following A Singsong and a Scrap (2005) is like most of the band's recent albums played in a style of a cappella, English folk music, i.e. folk with focus on vocal harmonies. The album contains 25 listed tracks of which approx. half are just around one minute long, which in that respect follows the same formula as WYSIWYG from 2000. The full title of the album is actually: The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or from Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won. - needless say the title is commonly abbreviated.
Thematically, Chumbawamba hasn't changed its lyrics much over two decades. The change one will notice here is a stronger (local) social awareness in the bands' topics to direct its criticism on English politics that involve the ordinary Brit, and in that way this may be seen as a nice return to form.
At first, I found it a peculiar step away from the band's more musically pop- and dance-minded albums of the '90s, which brought the band fame, good reviews and some fine sales. I must admit, though, that this is no such thing as a lesser album. It's just very different. I think, they may have realised that all their good intentions about reaching more people with their messages through popular music was something they couldn't win. If the songs were popular, well, they were that, but the message drowned in a pool of commercialism, and where WYSIWYG was neither fish nor flesh, this presents a welcomed return of Chumbawamba as the world has come to know of it.
This album is smooth and beautiful - a truly fine accomplishment.
Recommendable.
[ allmusic.com 4 / 5 stars ]
