‘This is our new album, it’s not like our
old one’ claims the sticker on the cover of the
second Lemon Jelly opus, and ’64-’95
is certainly a very different affair from the naïve
vision that was running, until now, through the band’s
releases.
London-based Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen first appeared
at the tail end of the nineties with a series of limited
edition EPs, later collected on Lemonjelly.ky,
before the pair focussed on their first full length.
Lost Horizons
was released in the summer of 2002. More coherent as
a full length than Lemonjelly.ky, this album
was nevertheless the result of a very similar work process,
only offering a more detailed version of the pair’s
original laidback, sun-drenched dream pop.
For ’64-’95, Lemon Jelly have seriously
tightened up their brief, restraining themselves to
use only one sample per track. This doesn’t however
mean that they have restricted their soundscapes. Here,
Deakin and Franglen collect an impressive array of genres
and sounds, from heavy metal to seventies psychedelic
pop to punk, processing them the Lemon Jelly way to
eventually regurgitate them all into what is their most
varied and exhilarating record to date. Using samples
from records dating between 1964 and 1995, hence the
title, this album sees Lemon Jelly developing a more
confident, and at times, aggressive, approach. If Stay
With You, which makes good use of Gallagher and
Lyle’s I Wanna Stay With You, or the
rather uninspired The Slow Train, remain close
to the pair’s original sound, Come Down On
Me, The Shouty Track and the haunting
Go, which brings this album to a magnificent
close, suggest far more contrasted, and somewhat darker,
terrains. Here, Deakin and Franglen swap languorous
arrangements for more upfront structures, injecting
guitars and heavy rhythmic sections to assert their
position. In between those two poles, Lemon Jelly alternate
between bucolic (Only Time), soulful (Make
Things Right) or evocative (Don’t Stop
Now) moments without losing for an instant view
on the homogeneity of the project. As diverse as ’64-’95
gets, it remains extremely coherent, demonstrating that
Lemon Jelly have lost nothing of their sharp sense of
production.
Far from seeing Lemon Jelly stagnate or repeat themselves,
’64-’95 shows how adaptable Deakin
and Franglen are, not only in respect of the world that
surrounds them, but also of their own universe. As varied
and unpredictable as their DJ sets, this album is more
than a simple evolution in the Lemon Jelly concept.
The pair defines here new grounds for them to explore,
and if the concept of using a single sample for each
track could appear constraining at first, it has in
actually liberated the band and opened a considerable
amount of avenues.
4.5/5 |
