Friends of the Earth
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The album cover is a painting by Blatt
Ad Hoc Review…And The Native Hipsters have been mining a musical vein as curious and abstruse as their ass-backward band name since their inception in the late '70s. Long a point of adored obsession or consternation in their native Britain, where John Peel terrorized an unsuspecting nation of pop fans with their deliriously recursive and unhinged sounding paen to obsessive subjectivity, There Goes Concorde Again, the duo of William Wilding and Nanette "Blatt" Greenblatt have continued to persevere against the fickle whims of public taste, despite all odds.
As evidenced by the track at hand, culled from their new CD "Original Copy", the muse that they've followed is singular enough that some 33 years later, their effortless melange of droll off-hand gestures and unexpected sophistication still exists on an idiomatic island that's solely their own. On Long Distance Running, they're joined by none other than production mega-legend Tony Visconti (Bowie, T. Rex, Gentle Giant), whose presence is a telling testament to the extent of their hold on Britain's imagination via Peel's campaign, whipping up a rich lather of arch-ironic, acid rock guitar masturbation as Blatt spills her proprietary blend of sing-song sprechtstimme and cheerful non sequiturs. (via Mutant Sounds) William Wilding – who occasionally pops up at festivals as vinyl-smashing cabaret lunatic Woody Bop Muddy – and visual artist Nanette “Blatt” Greenblatt. Original Copy, happily, is business as usual, which is to say, it’s not usual in any sense.With an Ivor Cutler-esque sense of the surreal, tinted with the deadpan absurdism of I Ludicrous, they can be funny as on “A Drink With The Girls”, a Mike Leigh-meets-Luis Buñuel dating duet, but more often they’re simply fascinatingly strange, Blatt’s faintly Northern tones ruminating on whether to run off with a dog that buys ecological washing powder, and suchlike. The music is equally offbeat, running the gamut from caustic free jazz to Bontempi cheese in a single song, but also containing enough melody to boost the likes of ecological parable “Goodbye To Everything”. There is an unlikely cover of Grinderman’s “No Pussy Blues” featuring, of all people, David Bowie producer Tony Visconti on a recorder solo. |