ALBUM REVIEWS

ALBUM REVIEWS

RICHARD & DANNY THOMPSON

Industry

Parlophone

Coming neither to bury nor praise Industry so much as muse upon our changing relations with it, Richard & Danny Thompson's concept album is a chronicle of disillusion aptly illustrating our ambivalence towards the filthy business of work. Mixing five of Danny's instrumentals with six of Richard's typically astringent songs, it performs constant switchbacks between the notion of pride in work and acknowledgement of industry's dehumanising effect on the worker.

The instrumentals are necessarily impressionistic, such as the limpid guitar piece memorialising child labourers in "Children Of The Dark", while the songs bite more tenaciously at inequality, sometimes in unusual fashion. The appropriately dolorous "Drifting Through The Days", for instance, with the privations of the downsized life, whereas "Sweetheart on The Barricade" speaks eloquently about solidarity, pride and love on the picketline. The paradoxical relationship of worker and industry is, perhaps, best expressed in the tale of the "Saboteur" who, intending to sabotage a cotton mill, is mesmerised into inaction by his encounter with the machine. In more ways than one, apparently, it's a case of industry - can't live with it, can't live without it.

THE FOLK IMPLOSION

Dare To Be Surprised

Communication COMM45

The lo-fi, slacker roots of Lou (Sebadoh) Barlow and John Davis are still audible in this debut album, but there is a much firmer sense of volition about the enterprise - which, I suppose, is itself enough to justify the presumption in the title. The duo even point out that "no analog recording equipment was used in the production of this record", implying entry into the digital domain more usually inhabited by techno types and computer boffins. Judging by their appearance, that would only be one smallish step for nerdkind.

They don't stray too far from earnest indie mode - all "Psycho Killer"- style plodding beats and spiky, inquisitive guitars - but there is an engaging sense of collusion about the material. To use a phrase from "Wide Web", it's a "healthy and stealthy" approach, though scarred with a nagging undertow of emotional espionage. In one song, the singer claims he "wrote you a letter but [I] threw it away", while another finds him "writing my novel with a stick in the sand/ waiting for a wave [to] come wash it all away". Such intimations of impermanence and erasure suggest that their hearts still cleave to the uncertainties of the slacker mode, but the increasingly clean lines of their music speak of broader horizons beyond.

SPEEDY

Public Energy No. 1

Novamute NoMu54CD

Rotterdam's Jochem Paap, aka Speedy J, has shifted direction somewhat since the smooth, gliding techno of his Ginger album of a few years back. Eschewing anything that might be considered vaguely dancefloor-friendly, he has applied technology here to carving rough, pitted slabs of industrial techno and sheets of distorted ambient noise.

The style is closer to Krautrock in its various guises than to disco. The alien shimmers of "Tuning In" and "Melanor", the staccato electronic chatter of "In-formation", and the shadowy tones of "Tesla" all splash crude abstract washes of sound around. Brittle and antagonistic, it has the superficial appearance of the avant-garde, but it is hardly original - indeed, anyone familiar with early Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle will find it quite nostalgic, but no easier to listen to, for that.

TUATARA

Breaking the Ethers

Epic EPC 4875402

Tuatara's circumstances are far from normal, comprising as they do members of renowned Seattle bands and most significantly, Peter Buck from REM. Aficionado interest alone would guarantee sales, so Tuatara find no difficulty in getting a major-label release for what is basically a form of ponderous jazz-rock in which vibes, marimba, dulcimer and saxophone dance lumpily over double-bass grooves, like baby elephants learning to frolic.

As with most jazz-rock, the absence of necessity has orphaned invention. It will be more interesting to hear how the quartet's sound blends with the songs of former American Music Club writer Mark Eitzel, on whose forthcoming (Buck-produced) album they play.