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4 out of 10
Now I like a good bit of verbosity as much as the next fatuous opinion-spigot, but Nottingham's self-professed underground-dwellers Papa La Bas take the biscuit, the cake.in fact, let's go for it - they take the entire bakery. Not with their songs (Which are a sparse old trip, truth be told) but with their PR. What has been written about their music is a veritable work of performance art itself. The trouble is it has very little connection with the actual noise of the Notts-based duo (Vocalist Dr. Siobhan Lynch and an electric fellow with damaged feet whose name I refuse to type, since he tediously alternates upper- and lower-case letters). This is unfortunate, since reading phrases such as 'Papa La Bas is two gumbo-stinkin bitches, who make spells out of digital transducers and gravy' and 'Papa.slinks from pillar to post at night in a dance of pure feral libidinousness' conjure an image of The League of Gentlemencovering The Prodigy at a bare-knuckle dogging competition - a combination which could send the tabloid-reading Great British Public ™ catatonic (No bad thing).
No, I'm afraid what we have here is St. Etienne singing along to Portishead in the shower. Far from being 'gumbo-stinkin', the songs provide a lightly inoffensive soundtrack to chilling out after doing something frantic at a festival (Looking for useable toilet, say, or trying to escape the stampede of drones going to catch the latest crack-addicted Brit School graduate). I'll Come Round does have some tantalisingly stuttering double-bass and a closing sample of rhythmic vinyl hiss along with Lynch's Cracknell-isms but it is on Middle Lane that we are forced into a Transit van at glowstick-point and driven blindfold down the M5 to a Bristol club playing Dummy on a loop. Beth Gibbons and co. could sue - the track only lacks a twangy guitar stab or distorted DJ shout-out. A Scooby-Doo beginning takes us eventually to slowed-down gunshot snares which could be the sound of the duo being executed by a trip-hop firing squad.
Their cover of Cutting Crew's Died In Your Arms on their MySpace, though. that is something else.
Listen: www.myspace.com/papalabasuk
Tracklist:
1. I'll Come Round
2. Middle Lane
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