Artist : Chungking
Album : Stay Up Forever
Label : Gut Records
Genre : Trip-Hop
Bitrate : 213 kbps avg
Source : CD (LP)
Playtime : 00:18:32 (29.5MB)
Rls date : 2007-04-03
Store date : 2007-00-00
[Track List]
1. Love Is Here To Stay 3:20
2. Itch & Scratch 3:32
3. Baby 3:21
4. Stay Up Forever 3:04
5. Beautiful Inside 5:15
"Imagine Goldfrapp & The Banshees meeting the Twisted
Scissor Sisters down the discotheque, or a gothic
electropop adventure with a delicious new wave twist.
Imagine the album you might expect from a man obsessed
with 70s hits compilations and Readers Digest albums, and
a woman passionate about The Pretenders, Grace Jones and
Kate Bush. Imagine this: a celebration of how the best pop
need not be obvious in order to be immediate, in an album
so layered with hooks both hidden and manifest that it has
a spooky ability to throw up something new with each and
every listen.
You may know Chungking - Brighton based, born and bred -
from their rather splendid and critically well-received
album The Hungry Years a couple of years back. This isn't
very helpful, and you might have to forget everything you
thought you already knew, because for their second album
Stay Up Forever Chungking - Sean Hennessey and Jessie
Banks - have delivered an almighty beast of a modern pop
album. If The Hungry Years was Chungking flicking through
the papers while eating a croissant on Sunday morning,
then Stay Up Forever is the sound of the band kicking off
their shoes and dancing right through Saturday night and
beyond.
'Love Is Here To Stay' is the perfect example of this; a
sassy slice of low slung, dirty funk that, according to
Sean is a "filthy song which says it's okay to put your
hands down somebody's pants and not necessarily mine - get
the motor running and we'll stick our hands down
everyone's pants'". Recorded almost entirely in a room
above 'Mad' Frankie Fraser's pub in Brighton, Stay Up
Forever takes Chungking in an exciting new direction, but
that's not all to have changed since the band's early
days, because while they were once 'an item' their
partnership is now strictly business, and what remains is
a solid affiliation concentrating on shared instincts and
an intimate ability to second-guess ideas, melodies and
production touches.
Inevitably this is, at times, an incredibly intimate
album, but one which somehow also manages to just suck you
in. "Essentially," Jessie explains, "what we love is song.
That's as close as we can come to defining our favourite
music. With this album specifically we've tried to make a
good pop album." Mission accomplished we reckon.