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There’s loads of stuff here, less than 40 minutes in length but 14 songs and more chops and changes than you can shake a stick at.
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There’s loads of stuff here, less than 40 minutes in length but 14 songs and more chops and changes than you can shake a stick at.
I’ve been listening to this for a few days now. I’m still listening, so it’s definitely doing something for me. “It’s not my cup of tea” was my first impression but just because a first impression lasts doesn’t mean that it’s correct. OK, so it’s not a cup of tea at all. In reality, it’s a gift-box of individually wrapped sachets of tea. There’s loads of stuff here, less than 40 minutes in length but 14 songs and more chops and changes than you can shake a stick at.
The Duds (as they are probably not known) don’t seem to be able to let it lie. It annoyed me at first but I’m slowly coming round to their way of thinking. Colossus is the opener and it’s all evocative and plinky, before kicking off and getting all stroppy. It’s followed by the rather excellent What a Human Does, which is just bloody interesting, from the lyrics, to the music, to the arrangement and that is a truly admirable quality. Then we get the neurotic, schizophrenic New Song For You – even after a few listens I don’t know what to expect from it.
The album then takes a Valium and we are treated to the gentle side of The Duds for a while. Call me fickle if you will, but now I’m kind of missing the busyness and the tangle of the first few tracks. The simplicity however, gives me the opportunity to concentrate on the consistently high quality of the lyrics, be it a simple tale of getting absolutely langered in A.M., or the lusty, melancholy love poetry of Angels and Dead Friends.
Glance is a great, flitting, jumble of ebbs and flows. They do well to pack so much in to 2 ½ minutes without it being cluttered and disjointed. Later they even manage to quite successfully pull off both cluttered and disjointed, blindfolded, on a unicycle, at 100 mph for the frenetic and splendid Blessed Are The Strong which leads straight into Maybe I which has a Badly Drawn sound and feel to start with. The Duds don’t take the straight path to any destination though and soon enough, the badly drawn becomes the madly scribbled and the strangely daubed, but the Duds mix it up very nicely.
An album like this, with it’s channel-hopping style, is by nature a bit of an up and down thing, but the more I listen, the more ups I find. It’s like an enormous pass the parcel, the music stops and you peel off another layer. You may not always get a set of felt tip pens or a water pistol, but there is always the excitement, the anticipation and the thrill of the unknown.
So there you have it, it’s a bit like a gift box of teas and a large parcel used for children’s party games. And if that enticing twosome doesn’t convince you, Ireland’s Hot Press apparently claim that it’s “the 59th best Irish album ever”, so it’s probably somewhere between The Nolans and Van Morrison.
Words: MONO