Customer Reviews

Little Red Songbook

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Momus is a classic musician. A great wit pervades almost all of his songs, and penetrating lyrics are in everything else. I highly recommend his music to anyone who has not heard it, but be warned it is deemed quite offensive to most.

HOWEVER, the reason for this review is that I purchased the item viewed on this page and it does NOT come with the tracks promised. Unfortunately only the first fifteen tracks are included with kareoke versions of nine of the others. This is NOT what I paid $22.50 for, and I don't want anyone else fooled.

Perverted Scotsman Momus (Nick Currie) is here with 15 new songs for you in his style of "Analog Baroque." I can't go into the depth of this style like I can with Folktronic, but I can tell you that the style kind of originates with Walter Carlos, the man who did the film score for A Clockwork Orange. He made a record called Switched On Bach which remade a bunch of old Bach music with Moog synthesizers. It's a juxtaposition of Rococo ideas with the technology of today. Momus is the newest in a line of artists to create music in this style, although he goes about it differently. The music is hardly what I'd call baroque. It's Casio pop played on synthesized harpsicords. It ends up more like a tribute to the real analog baroque artists, trying to make something that harks back to Walter Carlos and Jean-Michel Jarre.

The lyrics are obviously going to be pure Momus. As always, he aims to make you think and laugh at what you're actually thinking about. The best example of that is track 9, soon to be classic...On a less dirty part of the cd, Momus wonders what would happen if MC Escher became a rapper because he already had the name going for him. It's an extremely catchy hip hop song that more than wanders from the Analog Baroque theme. According to Momus, every MC loves rapping about how he's the best MC around, but if that were true, then each would be better than the next, and it would be like one of those MC Escher drawings of the neverending staircase.

Unfortunately, with this album more than any other, Momus puts brain way ahead of body. He has the ability to branch out musically and a lot of different interesting things, as shown with Ping Pong and Stars Forever, but on this one he kind of pigeonholes himself with the Analog Baroque idea. It only gets him so far, and it gets tiresome after a few songs. Luckily, this album contains Momus' downright sexy "Born To Be Adored." Having nothing to do with analog baroque, it samples an old soul song throughout it, has a slow beat and a plainitive piano melody. Momus sings over in a quiet voice about all the reasons he's so adorable. In terms of lyrics this might be my favorite Momus song. There's lots of creative rhyming. "My favorite color is the emerald green / Chuck the football king goes when his beauty queen / comes to me when she's chucked him in / I was born to be adored by women."

Unluckily, because of legal complications, you cannot buy the version of this album with "Walter Carlos" on it anymore. It's a great song about gender misidentification.

I had been a Momus fan for quite some time when this album came out. Although Momus had used electronica in his work for many years, this was the first of his analog baroque recordings. I must say that I know several people who couldn't take this out of their car CD players for months after getting the record. And some of the same people (myself included) found themselves humming or singing the tunes throughout the day.

There are many stand-outs on the disc. "Everyone I Have Every Slept With" is a simple, hummable tune that tells all. "Born to be Adored" doesn't seem to fit very well with the rest of the album, but it's smooth arrangement is one of the album's highlights. "What are you Wearing?" is an extremely cute cut that should always be sung by a young Japanese girl (and it was on tour).

The only unfortunate part of this album is the removal of of the song "Walter Carlos", due to a lawsuit by Wendy Carlos. Fortunately, the lawsuit brought the very entertaining Stars Forever album into existence.

I decided to give Momus a try because I noticed he had written some songs for other artists that I thought were decent. Unfortunately the contrast between Momus as writer for other artists and Momus himself is stark indeed. Simply put, this album sounds like a cheaply produced, amateur demo-tape, and I can't understand how this even managed to end up in print.

The first major flaw of this album is Momus's voice. He cannot sing at all, and most of the time it doesn't even sound like he is trying. In fact, it sounds much like he recorded this in a tiny apartment at night while he was trying to avoid getting too loud and annoying the neighbors. Most of the time the lyrics just fall listlessly and carelessly out of his mouth, without even the slightest effort at controlling his tone or tuning. The few times that he does seem to be putting effort into it, you can immediately see why he doesn't do it more often -- the result sounds hoarse, nasally, forced and pathetic.

With a few exceptions, his melodies are uninspired and meander without any kind of focus in either tonality or rhythm. In fact, many of the songs just seem like they were written as an excuse for him to parade out his "witty ideas" such as his musings on "the cultural implications of... (title of track 9)". This isn't so much a song as it is an extract from a stoned teenager's revelations to his friends at 3:00am in Denny's set to music. It's flat out boring and annoying. If you have a copy on hand, skip into it 37 seconds and listen to how he sings "messianic." Complete and utterly untalented trash.

"Miss X, an Ex-Lover" perhaps epitomizes the "cheap demo" sound of the album with his mumbled, half-sung vocals, its beat that sounds literally like he put a computer microphone up to the built-in speaker of an 80's toy Casio keyboard, "instrumentation" that sounds like it was probably his first and only take, a rhythm that simply follows the syllables of his banal lyrics in a clackity-clack-clack typewriter fashion, and a directionless melodic and harmonic structure. "Oh, but he talks about getting VD!! How brilliant!" Right. I'm sorry, but this isn't avant-garde, folks, it's just bad.

The only songs that sound somewhat better only do so because of the heavy reliance on sampling, "MC Escher" and "Born to be Adored". The rest sound literally like he wrote them as he recorded them. No planning, no forethought, no real concern with actually, you know, writing compelling music. I guess his "clever lyrics" were supposed to make up for that.

If you think that childish sexual themes make up for complete lack of talent in singing and complete lack of craft in actual writing of music, then I guess this album might be for you. Otherwise you should probably avoid it.