ARTiST: Acoustic Ladyland
TiTLE: Skinny Grin
LABEL: V2
GENRE: Jazz
TiME: 46:57 min
SiZE: 69,9 MB
BiTRATE: VBRkbps
RiP DATE: Dec-02-2006
RELEASE DATE: Nov-27-2006
WEBSiTE: n/a
Track List:
01. Road Of Bones 03:07
02. New Me 02:22
03. Red Sky 05:04
04. Paris 02:50
05. Your Shame 03:04
06. Skinny Grin 01:28
07. Salt Water (Scott Walker Remix) 03:49
08. Cuts & Lies 03:16
09. Glass Agenda 02:41
10. That Night 04:31
11. The Rise 03:02
12. The Room 05:40
13. Hitting Home 06:03
Release Notes:
Now that the giddy carnival radicals Acoustic
Ladyland are on a mainstream label, where their
outsider hotness, or coolness, might be hyped over
into sales, there will be some attempt to convince
you that their deliciously delirious third album is
not, as such, jazz. Don't be fooled. Don't imagine
you are buying some kind of ironic post-Britpop,
post-jazz hybrid of neo-rave and psycho-lounge with
a safe retro-fusion twist. This is jazz because it
is fierce and serene, fluent and fractured, not
because it's pseudo-hip late-night easy listening.
Named in honour of Hendrix, Acoustic Ladyland bring
to jazz the charged, disturbing spirit, if not the
sonic specifics, of a postpunk attitude. Sometimes -
'Road of Bones', 'Red Sky' - they can sound like the
Spontaneous Music Ensemble playing the theme tune
for Poirot written by Kafka and directed by Spike
Jonze, which is pretty damned exciting. You can hear
what the snappy, insurgent ideas of XTC, Pere Ubu
and Gang of Four sound like - 'Paris', 'The Rise' -
when chucked completely out of context.
Three quarters of Acoustic Ladyland are also Polar
Bear, another great contemporary British jazz group.
Polar Bear tend to lurk in the shadows, and their
thin-skinned, other-worldly drummer Seb Rochford
mostly strokes and strums his drums. Here, he smacks
them into another dimension, joining the dots
between punk and free jazz.
Acoustic Ladyland are angrier and stranger than
Polar Bear, and sometimes there's eccentric singing,
from Pete Wareham and Alice Grant, as if
Brecht-Weill, Ian Dury and Poly Styrene have been
flung into the mental blender. No wave legend James
Chance guests, Scott Walker mixes one track, 'Salt
Water', and British jazz swings into the 21st
century.