Pop: This Week's Album Releases

REVIEWS

HAL WILLNER

Whoops, I'm an Indian

Pussyfoot

THE MUSICAL director of America's comedy revue Saturday Night Live for the last decade or so, Hal Willner is better known over here for his multi-artist tribute albums to such as Thelonious Monk, Charlie Mingus and Kurt Weill. It is somehow appropriate, then, that for his first album under his own name, Willner should hide behind a welter of samples no less diverse than his previous associations.

Whoops, I'm An Indian came about from the urging of Pussyfoot label boss and all-round sound hipster Howie B, who invited Willner to come up with a few sides of sampladelic material for possible single release. After a short while holed up in a studio with co-producers Mocean Worker and Martin Brumbach, an entire album was duly delivered. It is a delirious blizzard of sounds and samples culled from every era of American music and movies, reflecting Willner's peerless eclecticism and, just as importantly, his sense of fun. The cumulative effect is similar to that of Tom Waits' later work, a collage of just about the entire history of 20th century popular music.

It is a journey of colossal scope - a piece will start out at, say, The Cotton Club or Bourbon Street, going on to visit Hawaii, Fiji or maybe a Baptist Church service. Willner's favourites crop up all over the place - Sun Ra, for instance, is spoofed in "We Travel The Subways" and sampled in "Sango Montamaria" - but the album's real excitement lies in the revelatory trans-generic combinations that bring a new equilibrium to musical anthropology, such as the collision of European classical chorale with Native American Indian chants in "Alamo Hellfire". Once-opposed cultures co-exist in a new and harmonious relationship. And while there are a few superficial similarities to big beat, trip-hop, jungle and techno, it's not bound by such narrow confines - Willner clearly has bigger beats to fry than those dictated solely by the dance floor.

FATBOY SLIM

You've Come A Long Way, Baby

Skint

THE SECOND Fatboy Slim album - the third if you count the recent On The Floor At The Boutique mix album - operates in a similar area to Whoops, I'm An Indian

But, unlike Hal Willner, Norman "Fatboy" Cook keeps his eye firmly on club culture, crafting his crunching beats specifically for their propulsive power. His sense of humour, though, is just as evident throughout, not least in the enthusiastic American radio phone-in testimonial to Slim's ass-kicking capabilities which precedes "The Rockafeller Skank".

Slim's range of source material is not quite as wide as Willner's, focusing mainly on more recent riffs from such as The Dust Junkys and DJ Shadow, but his studio treatments are considerably more developed. Rarely, if ever, is a sample used in its original state here.

Instead, it is treated as a jumping-off point - something to be chopped- up, abbreviated, elongated, time- stretched, pitch-shifted and filtered beyond the point of recognition, then hidden away amongst his quacking synths and bumping backbeats.

To use a painting analogy, Willner uses his material in a largely naturalistic manner, while Fatboy sculpts sounds more abstractly.

THE CARDIGANS

Gran Turismo

Polydor

THE DISTANCE The Cardigans have come since "Lovefool" is indicated by the lyric to "Do You Believe", its antidote here: "Do you really think that love is going to save the world? Well I don't think so."

It is one of several tracks on which the band's cynicism, rather than casting some interesting new shadows on old situations, simply curdles the song. Fortunately, it is outweighed on Gran Turismo by the likes of "Explode" and "Erase/ Rewind", which have distinct echoes of the sleek pussycat glamour of Blondie's disco hits.

There is an enticing air of enforced intimacy about the album - a suggestion that sinister appetites are somehow being slaked under cover of cuteness. It is there in the knowing leer of the guitar figure in "My Favourite Game", an amused observer of the song's alienated desires.

And it is there in the filthy, distorted guitars that scratch across the smooth surface of "Paralyzed" - an object lesson in how to push the envelope of pop without tearing it completely apart.

"It's a shame what they do to us all," sings Nina at one point. "Can we do anything for you now?" How thoughtful that is, in every regard.

THE BOO RADLEYS

Kingsize

Creation

IT IS odd how the foolproof pop appeal of "Wake Up" has, over the course of two albums, all but evaporated from The Boo Radleys' music. Like its predecessor C'mon Kids, this is a thick, compacted prog-rock affair, overstuffed with ideas that are not always mutually supportive.

But the eagerness with which Martin Carr bolts more and more contrasting sections on to his songs, and then bathes the lot in turgid horn and string arrangements, rather betrays the material's essential drabness. As yet another guitar solo or layer of harmonies elbows its way in to earshot, it is hard not to think longingly of swapping the lot for one decent tune. The problem is most glaringly obvious on "Jimmy Webb Is God" which, in its failure to approximate Webb's enigmatic melodic style, simply serves to confirm that Martin Carr is not.

There is no overall shape or attitude to the album either, and the constant vacillation between listless melancholy and desultory didacticism is fatally enervating, as perhaps befits a record which concludes that "The Future Is Now".

If they were more positive about it, they'd surely see that the future never arrives. Once it does, you stop.