Tonight Matthew, I’m going to John Lennon. No, forget that. Tonight Matthew I’m going to be Marc Bolan. Oh Bugger. Strike that. Tonight Matthew I’m going to be Jack White. No wait a minute. Tonight Matthew I’m going to be take the entire pantheon of classic rock mythology and squeeze it across a dozen or so tracks of quasi-experimental electro-pop blues, mix it up with a little punk posturing, spoon-feed it amphetamines, squeeze it into a really tight pair of leopard skin trousers and ship the whole kit and caboodle over to Japan.
If you thought there were distinct boundaries between genres, boundaries distinct enough to deter even the most adventurous of travellers with walls you could barely toss oranges over, never mind hooks, then you really haven’t considered Pop Levi. Glam Rock. Gltter Rock. It’s all a pile of pants of pants to me. Tight pants, naturally. But pants all the same – and that’s the way it should be. After Snap Ant and Ladytron, diminutive scouse glamster stops pouring over his John Lennon, Marc Bolan and Jimi Hendrix collection and comes up with something that sits somewhere between the pogo-popping antics of a young Iggy Pop, Lenny Kravitz and an amphetamine charged Jack White. It’s there in new single, ‘Sugar Assault Me Now’. It’s there in ‘Blue Honey’ and it’s there in ‘Pick Me-Up Uppercut’, which bounces around the speakers like some J-Pop masterclass staffed by an army of Puffy Amiyumi fans with their fingers stuffed in a plug socket, taking up the buoyancy last seen running along Port Merion beach to the soundtrack of ‘Alright’ by Supergrass. Craziness and wonder? Certainly.
It’s part futuristic, part historical and part very much of the now, and minus the self-conscious attempts to distract from his formidable pop-sensibilities with shitloads of noise and kudos, it’s really rather good.
Mark David Chapman? I rather think you may have missed.