Hullaballoo
Featured artist: Lemon Jelly
Lemon Jelly is a British electronic music duo from London, formed in 1998. Since their inception, the band's line-up has included Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen. Lemon Jelly has been nominated for the Mercury Music Prize and BRIT Awards.
Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen briefly met in North London and became friends before going their separate ways. Deakin became a DJ and founded his very own Airside studios and Franglen became a studio programmer, before the two became reacquainted in 1998.
Lemon Jelly released three critially acclaimed EPs in 1998, 1999, and 2000 respectively, which secured them a record deal with Impotent Fury, a subsidiary of XL Recordings in 2000. The band subsequently released three full-length albums before going on hiatus in 2008.
Current, Classic and Re-issue of the month
_Metronomy/English Riviera
Joseph Mount, the man behind Metronomy, hails from Totnes in Devon. You’d never have guessed it from the locationless indie-disco of his earlier music, but the third Metronomy album sees him carefully hone in on the charms of southwest England. The market town in question is reimagined as (a different/fantasy) the English Riviera, a romantic destination where magic happens – and it’s apparent from the get-go, with the sound of cawing seagulls opening the album’s first song.
With this relocation comes a new sound too, a further excursion into Mount’s fascinating brain. The restless pace of 2008’s Nights Out is tempered with frequent moments of calm, and the insistent top layer of squelchy falsetto replaced with more modest, lithe hooks. She Wants is newly sentimental, adding a personal touch to the more generalised feelings the songs had previously explored, while Everything Goes My Way has a female lead vocal and the glamour of a John Hughes film from the 1980s. The latter is deliciously summery, but one of the album’s weakest for how uncompelling its structure is.
_Air/Moon Safari
Moon Safari, the first album proper by this pair of middle-class Frenchmen, easily survives unscathed from its billing as that most deadly of sub-genres: dinner party music. True, Moon Safari, with its blatant bliss-provoking easy listening chimes, sits well beside Everything But the Girl's Walking Wounded or Portishead's Dummy, but the album is steeped in too much musical verve and gallic humour to become as dull as Chardonnay. "Sexy Boy", the first single, is a rock-out slab of electronica about a toy monkey, for instance--hardly the thing to discuss in polite society. This album's highs come with their two marriages with the contributing vocals of American Beth Hirsch. "All I Need" and "You Make It Easy" are shockingly successful, with Hirsch bringing gravitas and sincerity, flagging the album with strong emotional pointers in the midst of their musical adventures. If you didn't know, you'd think her words were sampled from a lost jazz classic--that's how good this record sounds.
_Tricky/Maxinquaye
Bristol rapper Adrian Thaws, aka Tricky (once he'd dropped the cumbersome "Kid" from his moniker), was hardly an unknown force when he released this debut album in early 1995. His whispered, husky vocals had appeared on Massive Attack's 1991 disc Blue Lines, and he featured again on the trio's next LP, 94's Protection. Maxinquaye, though, was something else. It's hard to imagine how he could have stepped out of Massive Attack's shadow in a more dramatic fashion.
Named after the artist's late mother, Maxinquaye is a (quite deliberately) suffocating delight of oily beats and murky atmospherics, bruised lyricism and crafty samples. Tricky relishes his frontman role, that much is clear from a venomous turn on Brand New You're Retro (which lifts from Michael Jackson's Bad) and the man's captivating performance on Hell Is Round the Corner, which rides the same Isaac Hayes sample as Portishead's Glory Box (which was released as a single just weeks before Maxinquaye hit shelves). But he's not quite flying solo here, as his then-girlfriend Martina Topley-Bird steals the spotlight on a series of numbers. And it's the collision of these vocal styles - one croaky and smoky, one silky smooth but able to bear teeth when called upon - that drives this album to the classic status it today enjoys.