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Album Review
by SashaS
3-12-2003
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| Large Number: songs sprayed on hearing |
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Large Number: 'Spray On Sound'
(White Label)
Slipped disc #1: Large Number
As the music industry comes to a temporary halt - having ejaculated all their big loads about six-weeks before Chrimbo-debts and The Offspring and Kelis’s new albums don’t really count, do they really? - we’ll step back and present a twenner of albums you should have bought during the past year instead of the once you have. Herewith is the first one...
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If you happen to be a regular to this online organ, you’d have noticed that our fave office listening has been Large Number’s debut disc ‘Spray On Sound’, for a number of months. Behind it is Ann Shenton, singer and noise-maker with defunct Add N To (X); she may have appeared to be a frontwoman and focus of the trio but her first, post-band release proves that she played much more creative role in the outfit.
Large Number is her solo project - although there are five additional musicians [Pierre Duplan even gets a co-credit for ‘Crazy’, as well as co-arranging/-producing it] - one feels this reflects Shenton’s quirky world. It emerges with the funky-paced-cyber-cut ‘The Creaky O.K.’, that is succeeded by an off-beat experimental track named ‘Pink Jazz’ that has little in common with the genre unless it is the total disregard for the form and salute to artistic liberty.
More songs of such adventurous leanings are ‘Spring On Elektris’ [an electronic variation], mutated ‘blues’ of ‘Lexial Synesthesia’ , electro-discoid ‘Love In The Asylum’… There are poppier moments as well, ‘Crazy’ being a melancholic mid-pacer with a catchy motif, or the stomping ‘The Transgenic Banjo Player’, or closing, electro-poptastic, ‘Earth Has Shrunk In The Wash’.
Shenton is sublimating all her feelings and visions into songs as diverse in duration [from the precisely titled ‘Twenty-two Seconds’ to almost five-minute long ‘Crazy’] as it is idiosyncratic. Alas, there is a mo that is below par, an agricultural song, as we refer to it, ‘Emotional Life Of Animals’: simply noises of animals over industrial-cum-cosmic noodling.
Apart from this little downer, the main hurdle this album may have to overcome is that of smartness. That, to our chagrin, is a vice nowadays and not a virtue of yore; the times have changed so much that last week the top five singles were all prime manufactured acts [Westlife, Girls Aloud, Alex Parks, Busted, Lemar] and anything resembling evolving - far from revolutionary or seismic - is shunned for the familiar/reworked/nostalgic. All we get is the vulgar display of ignorance.
Quality music is increasingly squeezed out by cheap and nasty offerings aimed at people who are assumed to be both insufficiently educated and ill-informed. This, digressingly, reminds me of an episode with Yoko Ono: when the Japanese avant-artist started dating John Lennon, she was unheard of in the UK, while in Germany, where she was known and respected, their liaison was seen as the artworld’s validation of The Beatles.
The same thing now: Duran Duran’s reformation is hailed as the regaining the ‘good ol’ pop’ while they were disrespected in their day as much as Westlife are now. People, former shite is hailed as stardust! Atavism has become the state of our reality. Gimme nine cycles of inner turbulence!
To ‘clone’ a phrase - You can’t buy class, you can only buy bling. This lady wears elegant black.
8/10
SashaS
29-1-2004
Large Number’s album ‘Spray on Sound’ is available now on White Label Online Ltd
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