Staunchly indier-than-indie label Fantastic Plastic have obviously learned something that the majors have failed to grasp – this downloading malarkey makes for lower overheads. So why not pass the savings on to the kids, eh?
Hence Now That’s What We Call Music Volume 1, their download-only label sampler compilation celebrating their hundredth release, is guaranteed to cost you no more than five quid wherever you may download it from – though I expect they’d prefer you go straight to their own digital store. The question being, is it a good deal?
Compilations are a bit like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, in that you never quite know what you’re going to get. Strangely, this is a bigger problem with labels who have a distinctive sonic style, where you can end up with three decent tracks and a big bunch of also-ran imitators.
But Fantastic Plastic are about as far from having a single sound as possible – which we should probably expect from the label whose first release ever was by loveable loons Sultans Of Ping FC. Here on Now That’s What We Call Music Volume 1, your fiver gets you sixteen tracks that cover a wide variety of styles.
Firstly, I think it’s only fair to say that any staunch devotee of really heavy music is going to be disappointed; this is indie as in the sound as well as indie as in philosophy. But there’s still a couple of good rocky numbers – Ikara Colt supply “At The Lodge”, a murky dollop of the too-cool-for-school smack-rock that they’ve long been lauded for, and The Beatings give us “Bad Feeling”, a rabid garage punk racket propelled by fantastic buzzsaw distortion that only Kevin Shields could have engineered.
That’s about as hard as it gets, but there’s still some great stuff on here. The post-Pixies clatter of Chow Chow’s “Dear Francis”; the punky shoegaze of “Pass The Hat Around” by Help She Can’t Swim; the grubby 4/4 indie-disco stomp of Kubichek’s “Night Joy”; the endearingly silly cute surrealism of Angelica’s “Why Did You Let My Kitten Die” … all of these are worthy tunes with a twist, and a refreshing change from the same old same old.
Then there are the oddities, like the stark and angular post-rock pop of “A Day Another Day” by The Strange Death Of Liberal England (an odd choice for album opener, and not one of their best, but still a fine tune*) and the almost unclassifiable “Impossible Sightings Over Shelton” that has The Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club channelling H G Wells by way of the NME before it all went wrong. These won’t be everyone’s cup of Earl Grey, but they’re the sort of thing that no one can fail to have an opinion on – which is infinitely preferable to being inoffensive. The same applies to the fragile spoken word of album closer “Local Man Ruins Everything”, featuring Scots poet Kevin MacNeil working with Willie Campbell to produce a piece that Idlewild might have made if they’d never discovered the overdrive channel on their amplifiers.
There are a few moments of “meh”, at least for me: the limp po-mo pop of The Guillemots is utterly uninspiring, Umlaut sound like Half Man Half Biscuit without the humour, and I’ve never really understood the appeal of Bearsuit’s twee weirdness. But that’s the thing with boxes of chocolates, isn’t it? For every person like me who makes a bee-line for the Orange Fondants, there’s always someone who (as inexplicable as it may seem) prefers the Hazlenut Surprise.
And five pounds sterling is a reasonable price, even if you only like half the tracks … plus it’s going to a label that, you know, actually signs new bands and develops talent. And that’s a pretty good investment in this day and age, if you ask me.
[*Full disclosure - I know the members of TSDOLE. But I liked their music before I met them!]
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: acoustic, compilation, garage, indie, post-rock, punk, shoegazer
