I admit it. I cocked up.

VII - 4 October 1998

DAYSLEEPER

REM

OK, so I’m jumping the gun a bit here, but I couldn’t be bothered to wait until 12 October when this comes out, so I’m reviewing it now. Think of it as a World Exclusive for a Sunday paper. The music press (NME, Melody Maker) is probably going to pounce on this one with the frenzied ferocity of love-starved bunnies and proclaim it as the greatest single of the year while mags like Smash Hits will fit it in somewhere alongside the latest B*Witched number. So is it the greatest single of the year? No. Does it come mighty close? Depends really. It’s standard-issue REM, so if you got down to Automatic For The People, it could be love. If you wish they’d dump the mandolins and cheer up though, there’s always the next album.

GANGSTER TRIPPIN’

Fatboy Slim

Rockafeller Skank this ain’t. That was fun, a sort of Big Beat Hawaii Five-O that smiled at you before unleashing that horrible hoovering noise in the middle. This is none of the above. It’s darker, stranger, still Big Beat but nowhere near as immediate, all-in-all a strange musical experiment that sounds somewhat unfinished but just gets away with it anyway. Mind you, if you think this one’s strange you wait until you hear the B-side. Listen up and fear greatly.

NB. I’ve never told anyone this before, but I mistook Gangster Trippin’ for The World Went Down, one of the B-sides. I didn’t actually get to hear Gangster Trippin’ until it was No.3 in the charts. The above review therefore bears absolutely no resemblance to the song it’s supposed to be about. Oops.

SHAVING PEACHES

Terrorvision (album)

Dirge, but I mean that kindly. Sometimes though, you can grab all the ammunition you need to destroy a band’s street-cred by looking at the credits. A rock album produced by Edwyn Collins and the Utah Saints? No, really it is! "But I thought the Utah Saints were dead!" I hear you say. So did I. So did everyone else. We were wrong, weren’t we? You really, really must hear this album. Honest.

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This review ©1998 Simon Darnell.