FC Kahuna is repackaged for re-due massness

Repackaged just ten month’s after the original release, we re-listen FC Kahuna’s ‘Machine Says Yes’ to figure out – why?

If you are one who doesn’t like to chill out after a-tupping night, then FC Kahuna is of no use; if, like so many of us, you do like to relax then you could be in far worse company. This is an album that takes the après-clubbing very seriously, with the dancing hours not being ignored. It can certainly sedate you but also craftily get your juices back up. And album to rest, play and enjoy the indoor- game that is far from work inducing.

FC Kahuna is a twosome of Daniel Ormondroyd and Jon Nowell, childhood friends from Leeds. After years of DJ-ing, label (Kahuna Cuts) running and touring with The Charlatans, they got to cut an album. Their original single, ‘Mindset To Cycle’, reappears here to lead a selection of tracks that might send Massive Attack back in a studio for several more years…

Dance music and club culture have become as predictable as Asda prices going down. It is nothing more than a genre that is sliding into just another form manipulated into bulk-charting… Alike in all previous instances, as soon as any rebellious spirit is deemed a ‘changer’, becoming a serious opposition to blandness (that profit maketh), it is diluted and made mass friendly. Its ‘pioneering’ spirit of few years ago is roped in and substituted with some gimmicky dance-pop that is as dangerous as a vitamin tablet. Leftism is turned into centralism and, quicker than you can skin up, it’s become a redundant force.

No rot with this lot yet and there are several tracks here to gladden even an existentialist’s miserabilism. Starting in a very mellow manner with ‘Fear Of Guitars’, a playful little ditty echoing of psychedelic summers, as well as ‘Glitterball’ and the title track, FC Kahuna really blossom when let go of song structure – with the exception of ‘Hayling’ which appears to be tailor made for charts – and fly with it.

‘Growler’ gets things going with its bleeps, clicks and general bonhomie; it is even more intense on ‘Nothing Is Wrong’ that grinds its phrase until you are as formless as a Rorschach’s blotch; ‘Bleep Freak’ throws another magic blanket over your senses for the sonic-venture to reach another level when jazzy notes drift through the closing ‘North Pole Transmission’.

Great album truly deserving repackage so that many more could get the air-borne infection of good-time generously tempting here. This pink machine likes it, again.

9/10