Play 90 second soundbite of 'California 49' @ 'CD quality'
Now, you have to remember that I've been around for quite a long time and my musical memory banks are full of all sorts of useless information from way back....... and, it just so happens that We Happy Few make me think way back to when we had the American West Coast explosion vying with very early 'can white men sing the blues' rock kinda stuff. So, I liken We Happy Few to an attitudinal Quicksilver Messenger Service meets The Electric Prunes, playing around with lo-fi, 'one-take and we're off' rockabilly. Now that's probably ok for the older statesmen amongst you but no help whatsoever for the young and impressionable at heart!! So, what we have here is lo-fi, grubby electric blues cum rockabilly with a definite kick and at least one finger in the air to say b***ocks to musical convention and genre limitation!!
I used the term 'grubby' and with that I mean that We Happy Few give off a feeling of back alley's and litter, of railway sidings and oily rags, of inner-city blues clubs and crashing through fire doors, of dirty Levi's and unshaven faces - actually what I really mean is down-trodden and down on yer luck hobo lookin' for a place to sleep and something to eat - that kind of 'grubby'! Sorry, I digress - what I'm trying to say is that We Happy Few don't stick to any of the normal guidelines surrounding electric blues, they don't care about what rockabilly should or shouldn't contain and they certainly don't give a stuff about pop banality or even indie normality. We Happy Few play a loosely formulated fusion of blues, rockabilly and rock; their sound is refreshingly 'free-form', it's undeniably attention grabbing and it's blissfully different.
'California 49' and 'Borderless Life' are included here; two really interesting tracks; interesting for all the wrong reasons really coz We Happy Few seem to relish the thought, and revel in the chance of challenging compositional normality and genre acceptability. We Happy Few make a nicely brash 'noise' that some will find hard to accept, certainly in the first instance. Subsequent hearings may loosen the mind and reality may just start to take hold. Continuous exposure to We Happy Few is almost certainly gonna lead to irreparable damage to the 'normality receptors' and a possible addiction to We Happy Few's unconventional blues-abilly!!
I very much like what We Happy Few are doing - I love their challenging way, I like their sideways swipe at musical acceptability and I just can't get enough of their gritty, down-home-junkyard-back alley kinda contemporary blues. We Happy Few choose to take a tangential and meandering path to get to their musical destination - I applaud their guts and I admire their (slightly leftfield) vision. I hope We Happy Few continue in their quest to change the way we think about our music; this SW London combo show great spirit, great originality and great audacity and long may We Happy Few continue to rock our world!!
|
|
