Artist: Dury, Baxter
Label: EMI Records
Released: 2011
Length: 35:57
Rating: 1.2/5
Every now and then the British Isles serve up something you could hardly call the usual flow of mental currents. Beyond the psychedelic, stoned haze of the trip-soaked sixties and seventies, there’s also punk, heroin-fueled new wave and pill-inspired pop in all the time in between. Every so often something good squirts out of the cracks of club cramp, and the pop names that come to mind are Blur, Pulp, Ash, Elastica, a few Swedish hangers-on like Whale and, of course, that musical illusion, the anti-materialist Gorillaz, who somehow don’t belong in all this muck. Part of this brigade of light, jokey rhythms is also the only child of the once notorious new wave king of obscurity, The Blockheads frontman Ian Dury: Baxter Dury. Unlike the oversized shoes of his famous old man, Baxter took the road into dreamier pop waters, and has so far racked up three records. In 2002 came Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift, which got pretty decent reviews, in 2005 Baxter committed Floor Show, and last year he topped off his peak of obscurity with an album with a funny name – Happy Soup.
OK, he obviously had no desire to dive into the emotions his father stirred up among the gloomy crowd, but you have to admit that playing the rebel in an otherwise broken family can’t have been easy. Baxter Dury is a guy who has so far roped in Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley of Portishead, plus Pulp’s Richard Hawley, to collaborate and hammer out his ideas, and from day one he’s been swapping notions with Ben Gallagher, son of his old man’s comrade Mickey Gallagher. The collective drive hit critical mass, and from there a veil of coastal island psychedelia and musical pop art started getting woven. Happy Soup is exactly that kind of product – pompous, full of hints at something grand, and overflowing with its own mojo, which isn’t always the most successful. But let’s put the prejudices aside. Cockney is a tongue spoken by a narrow circle of people, and out of the outskirts of the British capital a strange iconoclastic conglomerate started rolling, one of ominous autobiographical storytelling about unwanted kids and bizarre holidays, with postmodern landscapes drenched in heaps of limp pop, disco sounds and dry, often superficial arrangements. Is it a pose or a deliberate act? You have to admit Baxter knows his way around playing with form, and now and then he even lands a huge dose of pure humor, which makes this lukewarm string of ten low-energy songs actually fun to listen to. The story of a girl, Isabel, who ends up on wallpaper and in the set design of a sinister disco town, is the intro to raging in first gear. A mate already dumped the girl, then came the narrator, and now the listeners can share her too … The deflowering went down on autopilot, with none of the drive or glow it needed. Baxter doesn’t stretch himself much, and the stoned, hazy vocals of backing singer Madelaine Hart melt into Baxter’s imitation of Blur-style standards, which somehow even suited Graham Coxon just fine, but since things in history only happen twice – first as tragedy, then as farce – another ride down this wretched, worn-out slide of musical obscenity feels like playing sadomasochistic games with yourself.
The surreal hangover vibe carries on through the next stretch of mediocrity, and the ravings feel like the morning after a wild night, when it’s not clear where the big party animal wandered, who he was with or what went on, but he’s damn sure he can’t work out why he’s wearing some rather generously proportioned dominatrix’s lace panties on his ass. Underneath all this otherwise carefree and breezy pop hides an ocean of sadness and hollowed-out despair that runs through the whole record. Just the third moment on the album, the track Leak At The Disco, marks the first third of this rather melancholic marathon of short little songs, with dreamy pop, Dury’s deep vocals and the bitter malt of the backing vocals pulling the listener into the story, and Baxter’s escapades are marked by the unmistakable scent of a woman. Meditation or exhausting treading water? In search of light in the corridors of youthful lostness, Dury dares to pour out even more heart’s blood, nice and slow. Dying in installments continues with Afternoon, Picnic On The Edge brings a bit more life, striving (in vain) to outdo his old man’s punkish output, and in the end the whole thing resembles a patchwork blanket full of patches and stitches, sewn-ons and tacked-ons, more than any kind of homogeneous whole. The album turns out a hodgepodge, a soup, a stew, and Baxter announced as much with the very name of the record.
A batch of ten songs singing about the life, achievements, hopes and busted dreams of the little guy is an excuse to reach for a drink and drown in hopelessness. The Sun is bitter and full of the feeling that everyone in life is on their own, left to themselves and their own wretchedness. »No one ever told us that we’re gonna be left alone« is a harsh truth that Dury sings with a smile on his lips. The sarcasm has hit its max, and the balance between light and dark, with the fragility of weathered parchment, has this time landed on the wrong ground. Because next time around, I’ll gladly withhold my hospitality from this cynical cheer from the Isles …
Lineup
Baxter Dury – vocals, keyboards, guitar
Ben Gallagher – rhythm guitar (track #1)
Mike Moore – lead guitar, glockenspiel, keyboards (tracks #1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10)
Madelaine Hart – vocals and backing vocals (#1 – 10)
Adam Gammage – drums (#1, 3, 6, 7)
Damon Reece – drums (#2, 8,9)
Mark Neary – bass (#2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10)
Billy Fuller – bass (#1, 3, 6, 7)
Adrian Utley – rhythm guitar (#2, 9)
Jamie Morrison – drums, percussion, glockenspiel, xylophone (#5, 10)
Production
Craig Silvey
Tracklist
- Isabel
- Claire
- Leak At The Disco
- Afternoon
- Happy Soup
- Trellic
- Picnic On The Edge
- Hotel In Brixton
- The Sun
- Trophies
