LEMON JELLY'S Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen have donned the garb of dance music's Merry Pranksters to great effect in recent times. Their everyman stance, tangible sense of fun and ability to (jelly)mould the most unlikely of samples into groovy new shapes has seen them gain a reputation as the acceptable face of the dance scene where the indie kids are concerned, allowing our daring duo to corner a market some of their more 'purist' colleagues wouldn't dare to condescend to, regardless of whether their record sales suffer accordingly.
New album "'64 - '95" won't hurt Fred and Nick much either. The record's title is culled from the time zone the individual samples contained within date from and its' nine tracks once again pump up the eclecticism with a boundless enthusiasm that mostly still becomes them.
And when it all fires up correctly, LJ remain as persuasive as hell. The two pre-album taster singles "Stay With You" and "The Shouty Track", for instance, still sound like mini-masterpieces. The former dares to sample Arran sweater-garbed folk beardies Gallagher and Lyle and still comes out sounding ineffably cool, while "The Shouty Track"s menacing creep incorporates forgotten new wavers The Scars' great "Horrow Show" and chucks in the most mental phasing imaginable to create an exhilarating end result.
These aren't isolated peaks either. The album opens memorably with "Come Down On Me": a strident, motorik-style track featuring a loud, swirly sample from metallers Masters Of Reality that's the very essence of max heaviosity and guaranteed to sound phenomenal in a big festival field. At a tangent, "Make Things Right" contains a sample from UK r'n'b star Terri Walker's 1995 hit "Before You Walk Out Of My Life" and is chilled and spacy even allowing for the entrance of a smart and funky bassline that guides it to the finish line.
If anything, though, the most unlikely success is the closing "Go". Featuring the oldest sample on the record, it's built around busy, junglist rhythms and a malevolent whisper of a voiceover from William 'Captain Kirk' Shatner that comes across with an air of mystery not dissimilar to the disembodied grace Allen Ginsberg added to The Clash's "Ghetto Defendant." Highly illogical maybe, but damn good fun all the same.
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All well and good and embracingly diverse, then. Elsewhere, though, the rampant experimentation gets too clever by half. "Only Time", for example, contains a sample of John Rowles' obscure (to me anyway) 1968 hit "If I Only Had Time", but despite its' mantra-ish premise, it seriously outstays its' welcome, as does the repetitively subliminal "Don't Stop Now": a title to which I can only answer: yes, do stop. Cease instantly.
Less grating, but equally hit and miss is "The Slow Train". This one is built around what appears to be a '70s soul sample, and features a neo-choral mass of harmonies as well as a train-like rhythm. Interesting for a couple of minutes, but ulimately something of a one-trick pony express. Compared to the ensuing, rimshot-heavy "Man Like Me" it's inspired, mind. Not that this is particularly horrible, but like a few too many tracks here, it's an atmosphere seaching and failing to locate a decent plot line.
Which, in itself, is a slightly worrying prognosis. Lemon Jelly's all-consuming musical open-mindedness is in itself something to embrace, while their thirst for samples can still ensure killer singles are very much within their grasp. Over the distance, though, "'64 - '95" struggles to convince wholeheartedly and allows too many unfinished ideas to stay pegged out in public. That won't be acceptable indefinitely.
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