release date: 1994
format: cd
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,64]
producer: Chumbawamba, Neil Ferguson
label: One Little Indian - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 1. "Give the Anarchist a Cigarette" - 2. "Timebomb" - 6. "Love Me" - 7. "Georgina" - 10. "This Year's Thing" - 11. "Mouthful of Shit" (live) - 12. "Enough Is Enough"
[ full album ]
6th studio album by Chumbawamba following Shhh (1992) is the band's first album not to be released on its own label Agit Prop. The band continues its change of style far from their early stage with protest songs of folk and (anarcho) punk rock to a more dance-minded style, as introduced on the fourth album Slap! (1990).
Here the subjects and themes are homophobia, strikes, fascism, music, and movies. I recall having heard the album back in the mid-90s and rejected it as... uninteresting. A decade later I rediscovered the album and now found it quite the contrary. Time changes everything. One day I may even like death-metal... [Hope not!] Sometimes Chumbawamba sounds like The Stranglers, sometimes like Carter USM, or The Beautiful South, or even their American "brothers" in They Might Be Giants, and then at other times it's more like pure Monty Python. Anyway, I like their blend of electronic, cheesy vocal harmonies as played in folk pop or sophisti-pop, and then sometimes they turn up the satire or the energy, which makes it a huge mix of influences and yet somehow they succeed in keeping everything nicely together.
The album generally received fair to positive reviews and it sold better than any previous albums by the band. The singles Timebomb and Enough Is Enough both charted in top-100 on the singles charts in the UK, and the album peaked at #29 on the national albums list making this a bit of a commercial success.
This is clearly the band's so far, and perhaps best ever studio album, imho.
[ allmusic.com 3 / 5 stars ]
