This album is a revelation; not so much as it is an earth shattering advance in popular music, but more that the Shaker (as I’m sure people don’t call them) sound far better than a Britpop band with only half a dozen albums to their names in 30 years should do.
At a guess they’ve all continued as working musicians in some form, so they play really well, have listened to a lot of seventies rock and have nothing to prove.
The end result is a solid — in the best possible sense — psychedelic rock album, with a vibrant, live feel, taking in a variety of genres, from folk to heavy riffage, with a few nods to the eastern sound that they are associated with.
They seem to have deliberately given strong nods to their favourite bands. Opener “Lucky Number” channels “Graffiti”-era Zep before launching into an intro not a million miles from Deep Purple’s “Strange Kind of Woman”. Standout “Broke As Folk” opens a bit “Dark Side” Floyd and suggests it’s going one way, then switches into The Byrds and then ends as a shameless tribute to The Doors. Talking of Floyd, “Good Money” is a perky remake of “Have a Cigar” (“Oh, by the way, which one’s pink?”), this time offering riches (“All you have to do is sign right here”) and ending with “There’s two types of cash in the world, there’s your cash and there’s my cash, and your cash is also my cash; it’s your cash but it’s always my cash”.
Whoever they nod to, it always ends up a crowd pleasing mix of dance, psychedelic rock and indie, with fairly complex arrangements, all while presenting a clean sound. There are no bad tracks. It’s not going to have you running down the street in your underwear screaming woop woop but it is an enjoyable set of psychedelic pop tunes.
JMC
