Lemon Jelly - '64-'95

Genre electronica Publisher XL Recordings External Links Official Site XL Recordings

On the front of Lemon Jelly's new album, there's a sticker saying "It's not like our last one." It's a warning for those who fell in love with their previous work, Lost Horizons; this is not another saunter through soundtracks of imaginary children's shows. Instead, '64-'95 delves deeper in the direction of their Soft Rock single, mining their record collection to build up a group of songs, each one based around a different year from the range given by the album's title.

It isn't the usual nostalgia trip, however; in fact you probably won't recognize a single record here, as the duo have reached into the darkest corners of their vinyl boxes to try and confound expectations. The first track, "'88 AKA Come Down", includes the traditional acid house sounds of the 303 bass machine, but looped over the top of this is a sample from what sounds like a furious heavy metal song. If their last album was about children's television, then this song indicates that they've moved on to film soundtracks, in this case James Bond; cool and deadly.

The album doesn't present the songs in chronological order; instead it jumps all over the place, with the second song being "'68 AKA Only Time", possibly a lament to the end of the 1960s, with the Chicago riots, the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and the election of Nixon. As you can imagine, it's a rather downbeat piece, with a warped vocal of "If I only had time" being repeated over a mournful breakbeat. Eventually, the song unfurls, layering in guitars, more keyboards, building up to a point where everything seems to come together - at which point it collapses and slowly tails off to allow the next song to start.

And this is where the problem with the album lies. Every song here has a similar structure; only the samples change. "'93 AKA Don't Stop Now" swaps in a female vocal and keyboards from the height of rave, while "'95 AKA Make Things Right" uses the sunshine of a 1990s soul record, and "'79 AKA The Shouty Track" is as punk as you'd expect. Now, there's nothing wrong with these songs, but because they all seem to use the same structure, they feel strangely hollow, as if the group is pursuing this as an academic exercise. This could be the point, to show that for all the advances in the three decades of music covered here, songs remain roughly the same, but it quickly becomes a rather dull game of noting what sounds they have decided to take from a year, and waiting five minutes to see what they did with the next.

It's not until the final track that '64-'95 really catches fire, reminding you how good Lemon Jelly can be. "'64 AKA Go" has William Shatner freestyling over an evil twin of a Henry Mancini score, and is as insanely brilliant as it sounds. It still has the same structure as the others, but Shatner's gibberish is more compelling than the repeated samples; he bounces around the left and right channels, not giving the listener a chance to get bored. And then, just when you think it has settled back down, he comes back, announcing "A moment later," just as a huge avalanche of guitars kick in to herald the end of the song. Shatner comes back to give us the last word, in his most serious voice: "And so at last, I understood...Go." It's wonderful.

It's not enough to completely save the album. The idea and the style of '64-'95 can't be faulted, and it's great to see the duo avoiding the temptation to rest on their laurels and produce another record of Lost Horizon outtakes, but it doesn't match up to, say, the depth and breadth of The Avalanches Since I Left You, or the weirdness of Plus-Tech Squeeze Box's Cartoom!. Instead, it's an album that is perhaps a little to ambient for its own good, simply floating in the air rather than leaving any lasting impression.