Add Insult To Injury

While ancient pop and cheesey hits usually mark the zenith of semi-ironic dancing material, there are a few largely obscure bands that transcend even the cool of appearing to genuinely enjoy - and hopefully actually enjoying - the music with which ones parents grew up. Stereolab are the most popular of this tiny set, and Add N To (X) are, despite being virtually unheard of by normal people, probably the better known. This is what you achieve by using a graphically explicit cartoon of a woman, a poodle and a freaky robotic gigolo for your most successful single. But just so you don't get the wrong idea, the poodle is more of a surreal aside than a key player.

Add N To (X) make dance music with ageing synths and disturbing robotic voices, and occasionally French people, for... I'm not really sure. Apart from the singles, I can't imagine who, apart from me, Rich and Eddie, actually buys their stuff. The catchiness and consistently dancey tracks are completely at odds with the weird beauty and intensely disturbing themes - in so far as their tracks, being mostly instrumental, have comprehensible themes at all, they're almost exclusively the sheer horror of human evil in its rawest form, but they sound so inane it's funny. Is anyone else actually screwed-up enough to be comfortable with that?

From what little I know of them, their music is an exploratory sequence converging on a kind of ideal point at which they can express their terrifying darkness in a danceable way and still fit it into a vaguely conventional album structure, and maybe even sell it. Avant Hard had singles that actually sounded like singles and, when it wanted to, it could be poppy and infectious, and Add Insult To Injury is much nearer to something almost marketable: while the tail end of the album still veers off into gorgeously sad and demented melodies - BP Perino and The Regent Is Dead - the start and the majority of it would be pretty listenable to almost anyone. They might laugh a few times, but no matter how seriously you try to take them, no-one could keep a straight face through the first "Do do do-do doo" on the first single, Plug Me In.

For twelve tracks, Insult does a hell of a lot. The opening track - Adding N To (X) - speeds along with such boundless optimism that the French children who chant the title at three or four intervals throughout it seem ready to explode with  excitement before it's over. The next run of three songs is the only nod to consistency on the disc - Brothel Charge, You Must Create and Kingdom Of Shades are all lovely dancey-if-sinister pop tracks that establish a vital definiton of their sound, before it lapses into what has to be the weirdest run of eight tracks ever recorded.

Monster Bobby, after the listener's been subdued down to vague normality from the bursting Adding N To (X) to the relatively unexceptional but nevertheless groovy Kingdom Of Shades, comes as a bit of a shock. In fact it would come as a bit of a shock after any Add N To (X) track I've heard, because no matter how weird they get you're never quite prepared to hear what seems at first to be a football chant from them. It doesn't change or explain itself at any point, but the jeering rhythm of five or so possibly drunk adult men starts to sound strangely good-natured as the incomprehensible nonsense solos gargle out of it and you start to think you can make out the odd word. But you still can't really believe you've heard it from the same band who wrote Revenge Of The Black Regent.

Tactfully skipping over the actually fantastic sixth track, on the grounds that it's called Poke 'Er 'Ole, Plug Me In is the laid-back robotic single, sung as a duet between the male and female synthed-over voices to the wonderful effect of hearing sentient computers collaborating on a song. The aforementioned "Do do do-do doo"s still crack me up, probably for much the same reason - the sound of something inhuman and mechanical singing that is just unbearably ridiculous. And through all its weird computer-mockery, it's actually a lovely relaxed song.

I think the track after that, Hit For Cheese, is the reason I drool on about this album rather than just saying I love it. An unpleasantly brattish synthesised Ann engages in a line/reply dialogue with the crushed-windpipe-effect Steve from Skills on Avant Hard about intimacy and disease - "I want to sniff your glue, I want to catch your 'flu". The speed and fluency of it is incredible in itself, but when the first set of lines come back and the robotic voice's wheezed replies come back hammered into a sick travesty of tunefulness, the disturbing, synthetic, happy-evil retero avant-garde dance-cool levels reach new and dangerous heights.

Internal Wrangler

Clinic were fucking weird at Leeds: weird, compelling and scary, which I think makes them this year's equivalent of Add N To (X). The only actual song I remember from their set was called Pornography, which actually made you feel unclean listening to it, and the whole spectacle - the vocalist's lips showing through the tear in his face-mask to let him sing properly in a full surgeons's outfit, the weird instruments with translucent pipes hanging off them, the music itself - left me feeling slightly queasy. Strangely, Internal Wrangler, currently their only album, recaptures none of this.

It's as schizophrenic and fiercely diverse as their unique image might hint, but it's not half as nasty as they look. The tracks range from thrashy, political punk - CQ - to gentle laments - Earth Angel and Distortions - to screeching, crashy metal - Hippy Death Suite and 2/4. The nice thing about this diversity is that the album spends just enough time dithering in each genre to fully explore it without repeating itself or even sounding like a single album. Only the distinctive vocals, tiny song-length and punky production link the tracks.

It's not so much that Wrangler tries everything and succeeds each time - the closing track, Goodnight Georgie, annoys after a while, and there isn't much in TK that isn't elsewhere on the disc, but the exploration of this many ideas turns up a surprising number of completely unique classics. The lilting nonsense lyrics of The Second Line hint at a restless itchiness that turns up again in 2nd Foot Stomp and even more so in 2/4, where the vocals get so agitated they stutter beautifully.

You don't have to shave off many tracks to make Internal Wrangler one hundred percent straight classic material - ten of the thirteen are more than worthy of being singles, and because the album doesn't really rely on hanging together as one piece, everything stands out well on its own. Clinic have been described by a lot of people as being interesting, promising or enjoyable without displaying any real genius or being particularly impressive, but they scratch something for me that other music can't reach, and even if the rest of their material is freaky to the point of being unlistenable, Wrangler counts as essential for that. 

The Best Of James

I find this album overwhelming. It is the first to provide me with the stimulus to write a review, though I sense it is more likely to become an appreciation as I write. I had previously always known of James for their two, of three, number one hits She's A Star and Sit Down. This seems a rather pitiful amount for a Pop band who have managed to deliver consistently good singles. I'd consider Madness to fall into this bracket too. James had never received a vast amount of radio play; but then I think Tim Booth's sanctimonious nature and the band's shying away from interviews may have contributed to this. James' music is so beautifully arranged that the fact it has not been spoiled by mass appeal is something to revel in. James let their music speak for itself, which it does on a highly evocative level. It is not innovative in its orchestration following a very traditional song-writing style of verse-chorus-verse. However, the songs' brilliance lie within their emotional edge. Tim Booth has a commanding presence with his breathy and at times siren-like voice. A voice that can be the catalyst for spine-tingling moments. James are proper musicians playing proper instruments combining elevated guitar playing with uplifting melodies.

The sheer quality of songs on this compilation negates the need to bypass tracks. If this had been managed on one of their other albums it may have led James to become better recognised. In terms of Brit-Pop, of which Sit Down is their most prominent contribution, they make the much hailed Oasis look positively dense. The album opens with some of their most commercial work. Sit Down is uplifting and invigorating. She's A Star symbolised James for me. Whilst it is a fantastic track exploration of this album and the rest of James' music leaves it behind, for me it was merely an introduction. Laid's lyrics espouse the more traditional values of Rock and Pop, "This bed is on fire with passionate love, the neighbours complain about the noises above, but she only comes when she's on top". Sometimes, "when I look deep in your eyes I swear I can see your soul", cannot fail to stir the heart. Tomorrow, at times of happiness, can bring joy or, at times of sadness, can crush the spirit. It is a truly gorgeous and intensely emotional song.

James: The Best Of is certainly worth purchasing and would be an enduring asset to any record collection. It charts the history of a Pop band that Britain can be proud of: eighteen momentous tracks that touch on human instinct and emotion. I fear James will fade into relative obscurity when they should be receiving world wide recognition. This is not the kind of album or music I would recommend to anyone - I'd save it for my dearest friends.

The Contino Sessions

Nearly ten years on we finally have a second example, but approached in the opposite direction. Death In Vegas, previously noted for their big-beat dance productions have wallowed in the spirit of rock and produced an album of menacing elegance.

This is a rare specimen - a record devoid of ego. Rather than stamp a distictive 'sound' onto new influences, Richard Fearless has allowed himself to be consumed by them, and his contributions come across as almost unconscious - sounds torn free involuntarily, leaving the record sounding perfectly balanced with none of the usual club-footed clashes usually associated with cross-genre collaborations. One result of this approach is that the album is dominated by four remarkable guest vocal slots.

The first - Dirge - has One Dove's Dot Allison autistically trilling "La, la, la" over a brooding backdrop of murky guitars and stilleto-sharp electronica, in a threatening contrast that was last heard in the early Cranes albums of the 90's. Next, (Soul Auctioneer) Bobby Gillespie unleashes his usual hip paranoias over a backing more subdued than those of his native Primal Scream's, allowing his lyrics a rare chance the breathe and stretch through this uneasy and nauseous track.

Iggy Pop's cartoon slasher turn on Aisha was an obvious single and easily the best thing he's done in twenty years. Coming at the halfway-point it allows a moment of tongue-in-cheek excess to milestone progress through the album, the moment of black comedy. Fine though it is, it pales in comparison with the last guest slot.

Broken Little Sister starts out sounding like The Jesus And Mary Chain at their most belligerant, a threatening storm of feedback degenenerating into a pulse of growing fuzz-guitar. Then, incredibly, Jim Reid's unmistakable belligerant drawl cuts in with a classic lyric of Jesus And Mary Chain perversity. It's the moment when the dark clouds that have been gathering through the set reveal themselves as a towering anvil-topped stormfront.

For taking four noted vocal presences and coaxing near career-best performances from all of them, this album has to be considered a great one. The instrumentals that make up the rest of The Contino Sessions dovetail nicely into the sleazy mood of bad sex and opiate nightmares that pervade throughout. Death Threat, in particular holds it's own against the guest vocals in a showcase of rock belligerance and dance strutting.

A second beautiful mutant child has been born. Is it going to take another ten years before we see the next?

Dancer In The Dark

Being shamefully uninformed about films, I heard about Dancer In The Dark from a review of the album of the soundtrack, Bjork's Selmasongs, and instantly forgot the name. When I finally worked out that the thing Katie was so desperate to see was what it was, I thought I should give it a look because it was supposed to be very good. Basically, The Onion say so, so it could easily be true. But there were two other mutually-cancelling factors, to me - it involved Bjork, which could only be a good thing, and it was a musical, which could only be a bad thing.

I'm about to rave about it, though, so I should explain how a passionate hater of musicals gets over the fact: basically, the film is incredibly dark (slated, in fact, as being mindlessly sadistic towards its heroin by a lot of reviews I haven't read), and the sudden breaks into musicals (brilliantly filmed - the colours flare into life for each of the scenes) are part of the steadily increasing dementia of main character, who's obsessed with early Hollywood ones and imagines music being made from the noises around her in her dangerous daydreams.

Outside of the songs, the film is soberingly presented, natural and very mundane, aesthetically. It really shows - in the first five minutes, before anything had happened or anything might have reasonably been expected to happen, six people left the cinema. But if you can cope with the bleakness, the story is enthralling and agonising, and you can't help but be dragged through a tiny version of the misery and cruelty Bjork's character, the factory-working single mother whose savings for an operation to save her son from the near-total blindness that takes her over in the course of the film are stolen by her apparently good-natured but secretly desperate landlord, suffers. It's unpleasantly effective.

What makes it, really, is the end. There isn't a hint of redemption about any of it, so if that reference to it being condemned for sadism sound off-putting to you, for God's sake don't watch it. It's just that the final scene - the zenith of the black, clumsy, sick cruelty of the film - is so jarringly done that your growing sense of despair for the figuratively crucified Selma is wrenched with a sickening snap into a beautiful sort of sweeping revelation about the whole film.

It's unforgettable - I'm writing this three weeks after seeing it without straining to remember a single detail, and I could write it again in a year just as accurately. The whole experience is so unique and powerful that its eerie beauty haunts you throughout and after seeing it. But if my factual description of it doesn't sound appealing, then ignore my emotional account of it completely - if you don't think you could like a bleak and shocking exercise in heroin-torture, it isn't going to be the sublime and enthralling film I saw.

Galaxy Quest

I hate Tim Allen. I would hope that I'm writing here for an audience of Tim Allen haters, because there's every reason to hate him, but Galaxy Quest is a sole reason not to, because it's ace. Okay, so Allen isn't the best character in it, but he does his job and the whole thing is - the slightly annoying aliens aside - quite a slick and likeable vehicle for the generic but nevertheless expert humour. 

It's worth pointing out that it isn't a spoof sci-fi film: it's not actually mocking Star Trek because the show within the film that the characters act in is intentionally much worse, and accordingly less successful. It's a rare thing, in fact - a genuinely, consistently and occasionally extremely funny film that's barely even farcical and never resorts to bad taste.

Gladiator

I think that, without Russell Crowe, Gladiator would have appealed to me for all the wrong reasons - my fixation with close-combat weapons as a child had me avidly interested in a) anything involving fight scenes along these lines and b) the Romans. Gladiator, naturally, has both, but that isn't it's main appeal for me. It isn't that I've grown up or anything, it's just that I've seen LA Confidential and having an actor who was in that is a much bigger factor than either of the other two.

Gladiator would have fulfilled any of those reasons to see it, because it's big, dramatic, violent, authentic and lives up to its claim of having Russell Crowe in it. The role is more restrictive than he is brilliant, so he's the best stolid general turned bitter gladiator you could wish for. The bad guy is annoying but, I suppose, pretty convincing, and everyone else is as good as they need to be, and that's all you can ever really say for acting.

It's about 75% perfect. The first two thirds are all spectacular or brilliantly orchestrated fights punctuated only by similarly dramatic Roman goings on. Later on there's the odd splash of violence or the odd scene, but in general its own entirely ridiculous plot runs away with the film, leaving it stuck on political problems and the emotional hangups of the emperor, neither of which it does very well. I'm not suggesting it should have been completely mindless, but I think it over-rates its own heavier side.

But for anyone with a subconscious or conscious lust for violence, enough of it is fantastic to make the whole thing compulsory.

The Long Firm
Jake Arnott

A homosexual gang boss in London in the sixties seen in turn through the eyes of five very different characters over whose lives he loomed sounds like an almost lurid collage of the elements a certain type of novelist would just love to play with, and yet to read, The Long Firm seems positively gritty in its realism. Well, perhaps not quite gritty - very few genuinely grisly things happen in it, despite the powerful menace of Harry, the gang boss in question, and his minions - but a long way from lurid.

The five accounts read like entirely separate short stories, which sounds unwiedly but which is in fact rather a good way of doing a fictional biography. Harry's life is fascinating, but it entirely lacks the structure of a novel, and so to glimpse its various stages through a series of smaller, self-contained stories about entirely different people is a very readable way of chronicling it. And because of it, The Long Firm treads a perfect line between readability and cleverness.

It's as much about ageing in such an exotic if sordid world as the London underworld than it is about crime and corruption. With the exception of the first, shortest story, all are told by people on their way out - an over-reactive, violent and grumpy once-great gangster; a more or less forgotten Lord plummetting towards bankrupcy; an ageing, out-of-work actress wallowing in her newfound obscurity; and a new radical professor, suddenly old, predictable and alone. But these, like the setting, are just overtones, and in fact each story is quite unique.

The writing is wonderfully varied from each character to the next, and the intersecting plots are fascinating. It covers every conceivable aspect of the area where celebrity and crime overlap, and reveals it to be a fickle and difficult world in which things spiral horribly out of control at the slightest mishap. It's an engaging and hugely enjoyable book, and very interesting idea.

High Fidelity
Nick Hornby

Purchased on a slightly unusual basis - that the film which isn't out yet stars John Cusack - High Fidelity could have been awful. But given my almost unswerving love of critically acclaimed books and the figuratively glowing praise plastered all over it, it wasn't exactly likely, and the thirty pages I read on the bus back home made me laugh out loud three times.

It's a fantastic book, but because it's funny and because it's got some sort of heart, not because it's insightful. It is quite insightful - more as a demonstration of how true our stereotypes of shallowness in men actually are than as any shocking revelation about male nature - but that's more of a bonus than anything integral to the book's success.

My problem is that I get so ridiculously involved with books like this that if High Fidelity wasn't a touching redemption story, I'd hate it. I need a happy ending or it would become a book I get so angry with that I'd be trying to forget it afterwards, rather than fondly remembering it or ever reading it again. High Fidelity ends well - you feel good about it and it isn't entirely unrealistic, and since you've laughed so uncontrollably at such an enormous number of points in the course of the brief and extremely readable story, it stands out as an especially good book.

Brief and extremely readable are understatements - I'm a ridiculously slow reader and I got through the whole thing in two days during which I was revising for A-Level exams. Like The Beach, only more so, it's wonderfully easy to get into and pleasingly difficult to get out of until it's over. And unlike The Beach, the humour is insistent throughout and much, much funnier than anything I've read before, Douglas Adams included.

If I've made it sound dumb, it's because I keep thinking of The Talk Of The Town which was in an almost similar vein and, though probably less funny, was absolute genius, and I really must review it soon. But that's not light reading and this is, so if you need some relief from anything, you need to buy High Fidelity.

The Beach
Alex Garland

Alex Garland's first novel was enormously popular even before the film was announced, and would by this stage be an all-pervasive cultural phenomenon if the cinematic adaptation had actually been any good. As it is, it's just an amazingly popular book that seems to appeal to absolutely everyone, if never quite entirely.

It's like a very well-written imaginary travel book that stumbles into Lord Of The Flies (which I haven't read) a third of the way in. The voice is very measured and consistent, and it draws the focus more completely on to the events - it makes itself more immersive by being simpler.

That and the impossibly attractive setting are probably its only strengths - none of the characters are particularly interesting or likeable, the plot's only interesting feature is the Vietnam obssession which isn't played on enough, it ends on whimper and doesn't contain any real bangs. But an addictively readable book in an inspiring setting is by no means a bad book, and in fact its lack of ambition is quite refreshing.

Overall, it's too enjoyable to really find fault with, but as a final gripe I'll add that I think the good humour of the opening few chapters isn't maintained for long enough. To explain, and because I admire Film 2000, I'll leave you with a page or two:

Shakeaway's Chocolate Fudge Brownie Milkshake

Since this is the first Shakeaway milkshake review, I should explain the concept of a Shakeaway milkshake - it features the usual ingredients of milk and ice-cream, in addition to a lump of whatever the flavour you choose is. In this case, clearly, a generous chunk of chocolate fudge brownie is blended with the milkshake, which gives it both the flavour and the wonderful chunks of chocolate, squidgy stuff and fudge.

Decadent, possibly, but the chocolate fudge brownie is one of the best flavours I've tried - the pieces work perfectly because they're soft and chewey, and the taste compliments the creaminess of the milkshake itself very nicely (this is something you have to watch out for - the orange zest in the mince pie milkshake clashes unpleasantly). Wonderful.

Tesco's Reduced Fat Cheese And Bacon Quiche

After flirting briefly with the treacherous Safeway's Quiche Lorraine and overdosing on the rather too heavily-onioned giant Tesco's Family Size Cheese And Bacon, it was with some surprise that I returned to the original smaller size to find it modified beyond recognition.

Well, perhaps not beyond recognition. This is, after all, a quiche, and it's important not to lose perspective on these things. It also has remarkably similar packaging to the older version, though the lighting is perhaps a little more exciting this time round. Still, as I say, this is not enough to make it unrecognisable to fans of previous editions trying to locate it in the refridgeration units.

But inside this only-subtely-different packaging lies a very different quiche. The rippling of the inside surface has been increased by perhaps as much as fifty percent, and the aesthetic contrast of the ingredients is higher thanks, presumably, to an improved recipe. Certainly the onion powder of old is gone, and the difference in flavour is appreciable. The better recipe gives the quiche a smoother texture compared to previous versions, and the phillistines will doubtless slate it as bland, but to my mind Tesco's Reduced was always understated, and the progression just marks a maturing of their style.

The short-crust pastry is as soft and floury as ever, and it offsets the filling nicely. As ever, the cheese is not really a major factor in the overall taste, but presumably this is more down to the cheese integral to nearly all quiches rather than a particularly mild cheese being used in this specific one - cheese is such an omni-present ingredient that we are already accustomed to its use and over-familiar with its taste.

The bacon remains unchanged, but there was very little to be desired in the first place. It would be petty to cite the occasional edging of fat when such things are so invariably lost in the general texture of the thing. While it's conceivable that more thorough cooking could slightly enhance the taste of the bacon element, in practice it takes careful consideration to find fault at all.

The Tesco's Reduced has evolved, and its new form is more refined, less obtrusive and - thanks to the increased rippling - just slightly more fun-loving.