With this in mind, Bedroom Holiday (we'll come back to the opening song later) has all the ingredients for fun ska times. Unfortunately, the lyrics are somehow uninspiring and the backing music feels like it's going through the motions.
Prince Albert ups the energy to a frenetic level and plants the tongue firmly in cheek. While hardly memorable, it's a bit of novelty fun while it lasts. The highlight for me is the immature humour of the implied profanities:
Dancing down the front,
Looking like a total ...rude boy
Unfortunately, it's often a case of isolated moments of enjoyment within each song. To quickly touch on some examples: The duet vocals of Point Blank are a nice touch, but overall it's pretty twee. Whiskey is probably great fun live, but the mayhem and silly cameos don't work well on the album. Ghost Bus has a great menacing rocksteady groove and the haunted sections are also a treat, but the sections are totally disjointed and the punk chorus is terribly ill-fitting. While I'm having a moan, the recording quality combines all of the typical ska failings, with a special mention to the dreadfully messy bass-guitar sound.
Even more disappointingly, while I really dig every section of The Sun Shines Down, they just don't gel together at all. Oh, and then there's Driving Home: such a wonderful horn line and musical energy. Such touching lyrics. But who on earth put decided to put them together in a song?! They are totally incompatible. While I'm usually a big fan of contrast, in this case the emotion is totally undermined by said bouncy verses.
With all that out of the way, I am pleased to report that there are some great instrumentals on this album. Speed Fever and Friend Or Foe both have fantastic moods, and susiethemuppet is a solid rocksteady effort. Therefore, I wonder if the varied failings of the other songs are somehow related to the lyrics.
We've seen isolated flashes of brilliance, but if only there was a song that tied them together...
That song is Last Night. Kicking things off with an insanely catchy horn line, it is a fun little story that nicely uses the lead vocal duet. And the chorus is a stands out nicely, providing a bit of contrast. But the highlight for me is that it is free from cheap novelties and holds together well as a cohesive song. Alleluia!
And then there's 60 Hours In Albuquerque, which sounds very similar to Last Night and features a wonderful spaghetti western horn style. However, the arrangement is a mess, showing yet again that creating a good song requires more than throwing a heap of great ideas into a blender. So, perhaps Last Night was just a fluke...
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