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Album Review
by SashaS
18-11-2003
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More on: The F**king Champs
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| The F**king Champs' 'Greatest Hits' |
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The F**king Champs: 'Greatest Hits'
(Matador)
The F**king Champs: the only compilation worth buying, period
As Monday offers choice of a mature Pop princess, Kylie, or a faded-attempting-comeback Pop pupil of Madonna, Britney, both using sex to entice parting with your readies or charge it, as well as all these compilations the record industry has repackaged for Chrimbo spend-out, there is an album that can blow all this. And, in spite of our pathological dislike of ‘Best Of’’s, there is a collection we’d like to highly recommend.
It is The F**king Champs’ ’Greatest Hits’. Pardon? Whaddayamean “Whose f**king hits?” Let me inform you. This is a trio of San Franciscan gentlemen who claim to make not metal, not prog, not grunge, neither orchestral nor space-cadets’ but music of riffs, solos and grandiose settings they call - “Total music”. In other words, it is all of the above and then some.
‘G/Hits’ is a selection from the band’s albums ‘I - V’ and you gotta hear to believe it. For people who have been around the world, this is a throwback to the times when things were more musically complex. Riffing was huge, solos enormous, synthesisers as big as a spaceship in ‘2001 - A Space Odyssey’, drums louder than girls at a ‘Pop Idol’ scream-fest, arrangements as thick as Black Forest [and we ain‘t talking cakes]. Imagine Queen crammed in the same room with ZZ Top, Rush, and selected members of Led Zeppelin.
That’s just for starters as these 16 songs of mainly instrumental music simply surge into the homage-dom as if it were a promised land. Tim Green, Tim Soele and Josh Smith got recording first in 1996 but it could have been 20 years earlier. Titles like ‘Hats Off To Music’, ‘Policenuats’, ‘Lamplighter’, ‘Summer Knights’, ‘What’s A Little Reign?’, indicate that imagination and humour are well represented.
These ‘Greatest Hits’ almost oblige you to pick up that air-guitar/drumsticks [mine is a Rickenbaker bass] and give the mane a good bang. [‘Sweet leaf’ is optional and, still, illegal.] The Darkness could have learnt a thing or two from these riders of the chords although ‘The Spinal Tap’ class is missing in the Americans’ opus.
To quote one of The F**king Champs’ songs, ‘Greatest Hits’ is a ‘Flawless Victory’.
7/10
SashaS
18-11-2003
The F**king Champs album ’Greatest Hits’ is released 17 November 2003 by Matador
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