Richard X bathing in the light of a thousand flashbulbs. Puffy calling in production favours. This a producers LP like B.E.F's "Music of Quality and Distinction, Vol. 1" or Timbaland's "Welcome To Our World." Now styling himself as a Jam/Lewis for the Noughties. X calling in a cast of bonafide celebs: Kelis, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, and er Tiga; but more intriguingly the cheap UK reality TV cast-offs of Pop Idol and Pop Stars, Liberty X and Javine, Pop-groups (then) on the decline, The Sugababes, even Flying Lizards ("Money") veteran Deborah Evans-Stickland.
This where my heart warms to his strategy, the bootleg king (“Being Scrubbed”, “Dancing with Numbers”) genuinely in love with the abandoned and rejected, delighting in reconfiguring the tainted as glamorous, toying with the conceptual boundary twixt garish and Vogue-cover. Even the most glamorous delights, Kelis singing the SOS Band’s “Finest” rubbed up bootleg-style against Phil Oakley’s “Electric Dreams”, have echoes of the gutter. “Finest” notorious in the UK as the shiver in the spine of Foul Play’s “Finest Illusion”, interestingly also a copyright battlefield. This angle suits him well everywhere but on the two Evan-Stickland tracks which “succeed” in recontextualising Deborah as mildewed debutante. Their “Walk On By”, I skipped.
The "X" sound wrenching rubber and chrome-piston perfection. For neophytes (who dem?): sonic signposts like early Ultravox, The Human League "...", Imagination and Mtume's "Juicy Fruit" might be helpful. Certainly worth investigating.
Posted by Woebot at September 27, 2003 10:41 AM