STAR WARS (BMX BANDITS) ALBUM REVIEW - unknown date
| While your average Jesus And Mary
Chain song might sound like a 20-ton juggernaut falling down stairs, and your average BMX
Bandits toon more akin to someone gingerly stroking a feather through tissue paper, the
two bands who emerged from the miserable suburbs of Glasgow in 1985 have always shared a
single pop sensibility. While the Brothers Reid prefer concealing it beneath a front of
girls'n'drugs'n'leather trousers to Duglas T. Stewart's
timewarped Barbie-doll anorakery, I like to playfully imagine that the day could yet come
when the JAMC could cover 'Right Across The Street' onstage (under a barrage of
guitar terror, of course) without anyone noticing. Maybe they already did, and we
didn't notice. This gentle collection of 12 songs (plus a remix of recent single 'Come Clean' which proves that indie-dance is so easy, even The Farm could do it) of love lost and unfulfilled (see, sounds like 'Honey's Dead' already) sees the Bandits throw off the more death-metal aspects of their sound and concentrate on sparse, acoustic-heavy production which allows the wistful sentiments of the typically pretty songs to stand out starkly. The only hint of their clown's humour comes in the third-to-last track, where the impossibly poignant 'Sailor's Song' is rudely interrupted by a jaunty sea shanty before slipping back into Duglas' heartbroken vocal again for a final verse. The really sad stuff, though, comes on the penultimate, title track where another seemingly-straightforward love song switches without warning into a diatribe on the backstabbing and petty abuses of the music biz where Duglas ponders taking the Bandits off into outer space to play their songs, before finally mutating into a epic Coke ad where what sounds like the whole world exhorts us to make love, not war (spookily enough, the last track before the 'funny' one on the JAMC album is also themed on leaving the planet. Coincidence or magic? You decide) . Strange and uncomfortable as it may sound, the BMX Bandits have grown up, sort of. Don't let them go. (9) |
|
