What does it sound like?:
This review presents something of a dilemma.
Bargepole asked if I was interested in reviewing the latest record by a band called Me and My Friends, presumably as it has various world music influences and a lead guitarist who has picked up some West African highlife technique. The catch is I don’t like it much so first, I feel a bit bad slagging these peoples effort, after all, they all look like smiley, healthy well scrubbed nice people and second, why review it for the blog if I don’t like it? So I’ve sought to open up the discussion into the broader topic of the merits of the world fusion style.
I advised BP that when I hear the term World fusion I usually want to run in the opposite direction. Having listened to this latest effort from the band Me and My Friends I think I need to take up training again. Look Up is, I think, the fourth release from this group and it is inoffensive enough, but that’s the problem – there is no substance to this light airy, breezy stuff.
Let me quote from the website “Me and My Friends play soulful, poignant and gloriously danceable music, subtly referencing many styles, including vintage Ghanaian highlife, Jamaican roots and Afro-Brazilian folk. The UK-based quintet create a timeless sound with a global outlook, performed with an infectious energy, and the result is instantly recognisable, highly original and truly genre-defying.
They go on to quoteLoose Ends as describing their music as “life-affirming”. I mean what the fuck does that even mean? Nothing.
The mainstay of the quintet is Nick Rasle on guitar and vocals. He can play and has an unusual voice at times reminding me of the high pitched fragility of Karen Dalton or maybe even Billie Holiday and at other times a more traditional English folk voice. And this where they are best when they stick to their roots as evidenced on the last track “Sometimes”. My beef with this record and this particular type of world fusion is that it is bit of everything and not enough of anything. A nice Congolese styled guitar motif such as on Look Up can give way to some cello, maybe a reggae sounding keyboard vamp, an emasculated afrobeat groove or perhaps some fey samba sounding stuff. Songs start off promisingly then other stuff gets thrown in so, to these ears, they don’t much sound like proper songs and are quite forgettable.
What does it all *mean*?
Perhaps the problem with this and pretty much all international fusion stuff, where the artists don’t have their roots in the musical styles they are incorporating, is that it lacks substance.Look, you could put this record on and have no reason to take it off, but you’d have no reason to stop and listen, or to put it on again.
Goes well with…
Concentrating on something else
Release Date:
Might suit people who like…
Background music for bookshops or cafes.
This is the problem of most fusions: they are the combination of items that wouldn’t otherwise meet or gel, needing a force to meld them together. So you often get all the bits you don’t want as much as those you do. In music it can sound great, half-cut in a club or outdoors in a festival, the cold ears of day revealing the outcome to be artefact unworthy of the constituent parts. But, inexplicably and against reason, sometimes, just sometimes, it works. I would suggest this lot doesn’t work, but I couldn’t listen to them, put off by the ghastly picture.
I can’t think of many that actually work in the fusion of the musics as described above unless they actually come from one of the cultures, or am I just updating the old blue men can’t sing the whites canard?
I’d ignore the picture, ghastly though it is. I remember the first publicity shots I saw for Juluka, which were teeth-clenchingly, over-the-top enthusiastically multi-ethnic to these British eyes, likely put together by a wet behind the ears – or maybe just indifferent – PR in Jo’berg with no real idea of how to present the band, or maybe even to whom they should try to present them. Didn’t matter a jot once you spun the record.
And it is so easy for this stuff to “succeed” picked up by mainstream radio stations trying to include something a little different. Before you know it they will be on a WOMAD bill… shudder.
The picture is one of their publicity shots.
I feel your pain. It’s too fish-in-a-barrel easy to find fault with well-intentioned, easily endured, catchy background music made by people who presumably have their hearts in the right place and have the chops to make an inoffensively tolerable tune. And by trying to avoid making crassly critical observations, it’s also way too easy to damn with faint praise. I think you did a good job treading that particular path through the minefield, and I know I won’t be looking to hear this record myself.
A bit of highlife guitar in western rock – are they the new Vampire Weekend?
Whatever happened to Vampire Weekend? They were huge. The Light’s daughter was a fan and we went to see them at the O2 on the tour promoting their last album, then they just vanished.
Not a major concern of mine; try as I might I just didn’t like them.
New album out next year, apparently.
Although don’t I remember* their main composer/musician left around the last album? To put it in terms we’d understand, this is equivalent to Mike Barson leaving Madness.
(*) I don’t care about them enough to look it up.
Sorry, but…. this myth about Barso again?
Mike Barson did not write all the songs, although he was clearly the best sole songwriter in the band. Madness’s songwriting credits – if only on their hits – are quite democratic. Barso didn’t have a hand in writing Baggy Trousers, Shut Up, Cardiac Arrest, the sublime One Better Day or – incredibly – Our House.
Strength in depth is what the nutty boys had, at their best.
Indeed, yet they still released stinkers Mad Not Mad and The Madness.
Iz U Mad? Or just trying to make I Mad?
Mad Not Mad is ace!
Yes. So is The Madness, at least on its original 10-track vinyl iteration.
I spy a new thread: polished turds we love.
It’s become legend, that quote, hasn’t it? I spy a new thread : Musicians dissing their own records.
Great review, Junior. It’s difficult when there isn’t much positive to say.
I’ve only ever dipped a toe into African music but it strikes me that, like most other kinds, the musicians are magpies. They’ll steal anything if it suits them. Nevertheless, you can’t escape your roots, your genes, your heritage. I really like it when the Africans nick a bit of western style. Then again, most western music I like such as rock, soul, jazz originates from African blood.
It’s kismet, man.
Unfortunately there’s a tendency, when British or American musicians in particular, go away from the accepted norms of White Western rock/pop/folk music, they tend to unwittingly smooth out the rougher edges of the non-White-Western musics they want to incorporate.
The better ones quickly suss out that sometimes it’s the rougher, off-kilter bits that make it attractive in the first place. The others just bland everything out and sometimes do real damage to their sources.
exactly Mike