Sitting comfortably? Funky modern-day fairytale up ahead. So, band from London province only really known for giving us Athlete (yeah, thanks) cobbles together debut album from their own restless imagination and borrowed fragments from old second hand vinyl, practically go into liquidation in the process (hence its self-fulfilling title – ‘The Debt Collection’), receive plaudits and critical recognition, but still manage to only sell about 8 copies. It’s like you toil long and hard to craft a fine crystal slipper, only to have it wrenched from your foot by fate’s ignorant hand moments later.
Enter, then, handsome Crown Prince (aka much-sought after and so-now-he-charters-his-own-private-time-zone, producer Brian ‘Danger Mouse’ Burton) clutching said slipper and professing that whomever’s foot it fits will accompany him to his American castle to craft another, indeed finer, slipper with all the very finest tools, not to mention enlisting the aid of further Princes in velvety capes (erm, Velvet Underground legend and sonic manipulator John Cale), to giveth luxury to the other foot. Or something approximating that anyway – details may have been altered or omitted, but the essence is correct. It’s a happy ending.
So how did a dizzy down-and-out Deptford trio come to be head-hunted by an A-list US producer? What was there in the first place? And what’s there now they’ve imbued his prescribed course of fairy dust? Well, in the beginning they were really a less annoying The Avalanches, sample happy but not excessively so, eclectic but not to the extent that a Zero 7 fan would be unsettled. With the Danger Mouse effect in full expensive swing though, while the ambience remains largely unchanged, the cut and paste dynamic of old is surprisingly streamlined in favour of a more organic, homespun sound buoyed by modernisms, a swelling psychedelic pop tide.
What this manifests itself as in effect though is a band that now sound like Scissor Sisters’ more off-the-wall sibling – see ‘Now Till ‘69’ and ‘Glitches & Bugs’ especially and their perky boy/girl light glam stomp. If two things keeps this album’s head above the water it’s Ulrika Bjorsne’s dreamy, engaging Sarah Cracknell-esque tones and the exquisite bombast of the strings that sweep across the backdrop of the Death In Vegas bass-heavy hypnosis of ‘Replica’, a highlight certainly, and the ballads ‘Yesterdays To Know’ and ‘House Of Lies’, the latter sounding a little like Pink Floyd lead by John Lennon. It’s not an album they could have made alone in a shed in Deptford, but by the same measure it’s not as much at the behest of DM as many thought it would be. Which basically amounts to this being an improvement.