-=- SHGZ -=-
* Shoegaze * Indie * Post-Rock * Grunge * Dream Pop * Psych-Rock * Ethereal *
ARTIST..: Working For A Nuclear Free City
ALBUM...: Jojo Burger Tempest
GENRE...: Indie
STYLE...: Alternative Rock, Shoegaze, Ambient Pop, Post Rock
STYLE...: IDM, Indietronica, Experimental Rock, Neo-Psychedelia
YEAR....: 2010
LABEL...: Melodic
COUNTRY.: United Kingdom
FORMED..: 1999, Manchester, Greater Manchester
ENCODER.: LAME 3.100 -V0
BITRATE.: 262 kbps avg
QUALITY.: 44.1kHz / Joint Stereo
SOURCE..: CD
TRACKS..: 18
SIZE....: 165.21 MB
URL..: https://workingforanuclearfreecity.bandcamp.com/album/jojo-burger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jojo_Burger_Tempest
https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/working-for-a-nuclear-free-city/jojo-burger-tempest
https://www.melodic.co.uk/products/working-for-a-nuclear-free-city-jojo-burger-tempest
https://www.undertheradarmag.com/interviews/working_for_a_nuclear_free_city (Interview)
https://diymag.com/review/album/working-for-a-nuclear-free-city-jojo-burger-tempest
https://quartertonality.com/working-for-a-nuclear-free-city-jojo-burger-tempest
https://web.archive.org/web/20101021074700/https://cokemachineglow.com/record_review/5715/wfanfc-jojoburger-2010
- TRACKLIST
Disc 1 "Part One"
------
1 Do A Stunt 2:43
2 Silent Times 3:18
3 Autoblue 3:29
4 Alphaville 4:38
5 Pachinko 3:36
6 Faster Daniel Faster 3:01
7 A Black Square With Four Yellow Stars 2:02
8 Black Rivers 3:49
9 Float Bridges 3:07
10 The King And June 2:06
11 B.A.R.R.Y 4:04
12 Little Lenin 3:35
13 Inokashira Park 2:41
14 Low 3:45
15 Burning Drum 3:11
16 Brown Owl 3:31
17 Buildings 2:15
Disc 2 "Part Two"
------
1 The Jojo Burger Tempest 33:26
Total Playtime: 88:17
Manchester, England's Working for a Nuclear Free City are no strangers to
ambition. Their catalogue is an odd blend of electronics-drenched, spiky
dance rock, imbedded with sensitive ambient atmospherics-which works more
often than it doesn't. It's a delicate balancing act they've once again
carried out over the course of Jojo Burger Tempest. Well... nearly, as there
is one notable elephant in the room. The band's sky-high hopes sink under the
weight of the B-side title track. Bogged down with what feels like every
album outtake, the half-hour ambient instrumental that takes up the entire
second disc goes nowhere-and takes its time doing it. In short, a master
class in the dangers of confusing ambition and indulgence.
Thankfully the bulk of the album fairs much better, its 17 songs clocking in
at a surprisingly lean 54 minutes. Equal parts Boards of Canada and Friendly
Fires-with a smattering of Beach Boys harmonies-it's a large, sprawling,
complex pile to work through, as the band offers up a tonal accompaniment for
nearly every mood. However, like many people, Working for a Nuclear Free City
seem to prefer their moods on the up and up as slower tracks eek by on beauty
rather than staying power. "Float Bridges" in particular plays like a
half-remembered dream-snippet (where you wake up before the juicy bit).
On the upside, the scale tips towards ethereal on "Brown Owl," whose opening
takes a page out of the Sigur R s playbook, before twisting back towards
party time. "Do a Stunt," plays like distilled sweat and endorphins, while
"Silent Times" wins with lackadaisical vocals and crashing guitars. And then
there's "Little Lenin"-by far the best song Franz Ferdinand never wrote. All
the elements come together in epic album highlight "B.A.R.R.Y.," a
slow-building, four-minute long crescendo that will have Explosions in the
Sky fans salivating. In all, it's a magnificent, ear-catching jumble.
*
Manchester, England's Working for a Nuclear Free City are no strangers to
ambition. Their catalogue is an odd blend of electronics-drenched, spiky
dance rock, imbedded with sensitive ambient atmospherics-which works more
often than it doesn't. It's a delicate balancing act they've once again
carried out over the course of Jojo Burger Tempest. Well... nearly, as there
is one notable elephant in the room. The band's sky-high hopes sink under the
weight of the B-side title track. Bogged down with what feels like every
album outtake, the half-hour ambient instrumental that takes up the entire
second disc goes nowhere-and takes its time doing it. In short, a master
class in the dangers of confusing ambition and indulgence.
Thankfully the bulk of the album fairs much better, its 17 songs clocking in
at a surprisingly lean 54 minutes. Equal parts Boards of Canada and Friendly
Fires-with a smattering of Beach Boys harmonies-it's a large, sprawling,
complex pile to work through, as the band offers up a tonal accompaniment for
nearly every mood. However, like many people, Working for a Nuclear Free City
seem to prefer their moods on the up and up as slower tracks eek by on beauty
rather than staying power. "Float Bridges" in particular plays like a
half-remembered dream-snippet (where you wake up before the juicy bit).
On the upside, the scale tips towards ethereal on "Brown Owl," whose opening
takes a page out of the Sigur R s playbook, before twisting back towards
party time. "Do a Stunt," plays like distilled sweat and endorphins, while
"Silent Times" wins with lackadaisical vocals and crashing guitars. And then
there's "Little Lenin"-by far the best song Franz Ferdinand never wrote. All
the elements come together in epic album highlight "B.A.R.R.Y.," a
slow-building, four-minute long crescendo that will have Explosions in the
Sky fans salivating. In all, it's a magnificent, ear-catching jumble.
*
Manchester's Working for a Nuclear Free City's opening salvo was their 2006
self-titled debut, a new millennial update on all things '90s Madchester. The
record touched upon the pastoral pop of the Stone Roses, was huge with Happy
Mondays hooks, and then fully delivered on Jason Pierce-style comedowns-all
while supplemented with heavy doses of electronics (i.e. furious laser rifle
noises) and headphone panning. Primarily a dance record, what it may have
lacked in originality it more than made up for in catchiness. Its martial
drums and ginormous bass lines were capable of jump-starting a cadaver.
That said, it's release on North American shores was extremely limited, so
many had their first introduction to WFANFC via the double-disc compilation
Businessmen & Ghosts (2006). Ghosts, which in addition to a reshuffled
version of the first LP also included the Rocket EP (2007) and a handful of
previously unreleased tracks, showcased a band equally adept at Beta
Band-like psych-pop and vicious dance numbers. "Rocket" still may be their
strongest single recording to date, a hypnotic groove that filtered Hendrix's
"Third Stone from the Sun" through a spooky echo chamber, every bit as epic
as the shuttle-launch footage in its video.
Clearly these guys are blessed with prolificacy. And yet they claim that the
four year gap between their official debut and JoJo Burger Tempest was
partially due to writer's block. But, fittingly, JoJo ultimately comes off
like a jam-packed sketchbook brimming with all manner of ideas and figures,
only occasionally coalescing into proper bangers.
Or maybe that was the idea all along. While the debut seemed posited as a
dance record, JoJo is far more of the requisite "listening experience,"
tailor-made for long walks, quiet contemplation in the park, and good
headphones. Less than half of the first disc's songs contain vocals; unlike
the band's earlier material, when vocals do show they're pushed far down in
the mix, used primarily for hazy atmosphere. And I mean hazy. Despite the
fact that WFANFC's instrumentation never sounds less than hi-tech, nearly
every song is filtered through a kind of pleasantly mellow mid-fi production,
even when the beats are at their most frantic. Think what might have happened
if Tortoise and Isotope 217 somehow ended up signed to Slumberland instead of
Thrill Jockey.
When they aren't making records, WFANFC have been commissioned for
documentary soundtrack work, a move which makes sense. I'd be extremely
curious to see them onstage-at this point they almost feel like a collective
of quality producers more than a proper band, and sometimes it's tough to
tell where the programming stops and the live instruments begin.
The production values and abundance of live drums are JoJo's constants,
allowing the album to somewhat function as a whole even when the band remains
all over the place. Speedy opener "Do a Stunt" sounds like a lost
instrumental from Yes' Fragile (1970) with a bass line so incredibly Chris
Squire that I wouldn't be surprised if the Fish played it himself. First
single "Silent Times" follows with a return to Stone Roses pop; "Autoblue" is
a burbling laptop odyssey that features the same chord progression as Stevie
Nicks' "Stand Back"; "Pachinko" evokes visions of a bustling marketplace
filmed in stop-time; "B.A.R.R.Y." sounds like a fantastic Beach House track.
The album is literally all over the place, influenced by seemingly
everything-and if properly "influenced," I can think of no better way to kill
three minutes than cloud-gazing with "A Black Square With Four Yellow Stars"
on my headphones.
As for the title track, it's a thirty-plus minute suite running through at
least twenty different motifs supposedly culled from over 1000. It's the only
track on Disc Two, said to have been influenced by hip-hop mixtapes, and it
serves as a microcosm for Working for a Nuclear Free City in general:
overstuffed with ideas and ADD to a fault, but never, ever boring.
*
Manchester band returns with a blend of live drumming, textural guitars,
skittering electronics, and wistful harmonies.
There was a brief moment around 2006 when there seemed to be a new movement
of krautrock-inspired indie dance bands. As if updating the sounds of
Madchester for the 21st century, Working for a Nuclear Free City's debut
joined albums by Caribou, 120 Days, and Fujiya & Miyagi, ready to soundtrack
rainswept city errands or some idealized Factory-like party. Fast-forward to
2010, and Caribou has once again changed pace with the beatific Swim; Fujiya
& Miyagi are doing their own quirky thing, admitting they "were just
pretending to be Japanese"; and man, it's been a while since we heard from
Norway's 120 Days.
So the return of Working for a Nuclear Free City is a welcome reminder that
the samples and electronic beats of blog house, chillwave, or post-dubstep
are not the only directions for headphones-friendly psych-dance. Jojo Burger
Tempest clocks in near 90 minutes, and once again it's a double: one disc of
17 individual songs, one of a single 33-minute suite. Such an ambitious
sophomore outing is a lot to take in, but with its blend of live drumming,
textural guitars, skittering electronics, and wistful harmonies, it's worth
braving Jojo's, uh, storm.
As in the late 1980s and early 90s, when Balearic and ambient house emerged
from acid house, Working for a Nuclear Free City achieve remarkably
adventurous results from indoor rave-y dance music. "Silent Times" beckons
toward Byrdsian psych-rock, while the intricate "Alphaville" manages to be
both gentle and shrill while referencing Jean-Luc Godard (or 80s German
synth-pop "Forever Young" band). There are sing-song vocal exchanges one
moment, cymbal-smacking drum crescendos the next, minimalist piano atop a
droning bass the next, and so forth. If nu-shoegaze rocker "Low" is a nod to
David Bowie's Berlin era with Brian Eno, it's a fitting one.
Then there's the second disc. Made up of only the album's title track, this
"Part Two" starts with a spoken-word performance by Chicago's own "rock
poet," Thax Douglas, a longtime fixture at local shows before he moved last
year to Austin. From there, the winding, crystalline track climbs from guitar
patterns that echo the Edge (in a good way) to Aphex Twin-like synth
experiments to hypnotic tone loops to video-game fuzz to motorik grooves to
campfire lullabies and, well, round and round again, back to some more spoken
word by Douglas. "A long time ago," ends the first disc, or "long time gone,"
or something like that-- you get the feeling, anyway-- and then there's a
resounding echo.
*
UncutOct 80/100 - It's never indulgent, always exciting. [Oct 2010, p.114]
Under The RadarOct 70/100 - In all, it's a magnificent, ear-catching jumble.
[Fall 2010, p. 64]
*****
About Working For A Nuclear Free City:
Epic, intelligent, melodic, atmospheric - this is the sound of Working For A
Nuclear Free City.
Descendents of Berlin-trilogy era Bowie and informed by David Axelrod,
Working For A Nuclear Free City represent the best of Manchester's
experimental underground.
The band's origins are in Cheshire, with brothers Phil and Jon Kay and
schoolfriend Gary McLure. Beginning as a studio project, they made
instrumental soundscapes until the addition of Ed Hulme, who joined two days
before the band's first gig. "We have always intended to have vocals on the
tracks, but there just wasn't anyone to do it," says Phil. "I knew Ed could
sing so we started recording his vocals on the tracks and at the same time
got more confident with my own voice. I still think instrumental tracks are
important though. Sometimes it just doesn't need words."
Taking their name from a sign they saw in Manchester. "We are not tree
hugging hippies," says Gary. "We liked the name because of the irony and the
related conspiracy theories of secret bunkers hidden around Manchester. The
signs have now changed to City of Peace, presumably so that the council can't
be done for false advertising."
Establishing themselves on the live scene, Working For A Nuclear Free City
emerged as one of the city's most exciting and mysterious bands. They also
became known for their remixes, with credits for The Rakes, Polytechnic,
Shitdisco, Archie Bronson Outfit, The Whip and Starsailor among others.
-=- SHGZ -=-
-=-=-==-=-=-
Shoegaze
is a genre of alternative rock that
originated in the late 80s. The genre is very
difficult to define, and it is even more difficult to evaluate music
within it. Generally, the genre is characterized by its
shimmering vocals, reverberating guitars, and
textural distortion that create
a tranquil, opaque
feeling.
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