Ham, by The Chap & Little Things, by Hanne Huckkelberg
by Ian Simmons
[ cdreviews ]
These days, when every hot new band sounds a bit like someone you heard 20 years ago, it is a genuine pleasure to come across a CD that sounds like nothing else on Earth, and The Chap certainly achieve that. Inevitably, they turn out to be a bit difficult to describe - they sort of rap on occasions, but maybe talk over the music would be a more appropriate description, they employ blasts of monster riffing, but offset that with digital laptop squiggles. They are individual, sarcastic, odd and defiantly English (despite having a rather multinational cast), a bit like a musical version of the London fanzine Smoke. I suppose the nearest one might get is imagining if cLOUDDEAd came from Kentish Town instead of Oakland, California. There is a whole melée of influences turfed into the mix here; 'Baby I'm Hurt' has a call and response vocal that could have come straight off a B52's album, complete with Fred Schneider inflection, but it is declaimed over a woozy riffing murk that owes its origins to The Fall. Elsewhere the determinedly off-kilter soundscape accommodates thin reedy Bontempi organ sounds, orgiastic grunting, krautrock motorik and, on 'Clissold Park', a rush of Thurston Moore-style guitar assault underpins keyboardist Clare Hope going quietly spare over her New Year resolutions list. For such a new group (this is their first album) they write an awful lot of cynical songs dissing the music business - 'I Am Oozing Emotion' rants about "Give me a contract, give me a sign" while 'Woop Woop's lyrics succinctly chart the boom-bust arc of a modern chart band with commendable economy. This is enormously charming, whacked out, loopy stuff, balancing musical innovation with a healthy sense of fun that never tries too hard for a laugh, but consistently amuses. Lovely stuff!
This, on the other hand, is not the case with Hanne Hukkelberg. It’s not that I don’t like Little Things, just that its aura of self-conscious wackiness grates after about two listens. This is a pity; Hukkelberg is a class act, she has a beautiful, ethereal voice with a nice jazz edge and is well served by quality songs. Someone, however, has got hold of the How to Be a Nordic Girl Singer manual and not read beyond the 'How To Björk' chapter. So whereas she could soar free and indulge in sumptuous vocal explorations like Pinkie Maclure, she has been shackled to the lead weight of deliberately 'quirky' instrumentation that tries to push her into the Björk bracket and singularly fails. You can't do it by instrumentation alone. I am afraid that this one has to be consigned to the "interesting but seriously flawed" bin, but should Hukkelberg be able to sort out the music so that it works with her vocals rather than against them, future albums could be very interesting indeed.
