In total contrast, the first side's three tracks, "Isi", "Seeland" and "Leb'Wohl", offer sublime oceanic soundscapes that, in retrospect, can be seen to provide an early bridge between psychedelia and ambient-house. The real marvel, though, is that neither style has lost its potency in the intervening 25 years, both managing to sound fresh and challenging alongside virtually any of pop's subsequent developments. Also reissued are the band's eponymous debut album (good), and its follow-up Neu! 2 (not so good) but this, their last, is the one to get.. Like the Stereo MC's, The Tom Tom Club were last heard from back in 1992. Most, surely, considered them long defunct, but The Good, the Bad and the Funky marks Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth's return in surprisingly sprightly style, brimful of bubbling beats and bolstered by a shifting line-up whose number includes multi-talented guitarist Robbie Aceto, turntablist Kid Ginseng, percussionist/kora player Abdou M'Boup and vocalist Charles Pettigrew (formerly of soul duo Charles & Eddie). With the ragga toaster Mystic Bowie top name of the week, I think adding the requisite dancehall swagger to several tracks, Toots Hibbert fronting the fast ska shuffle "She's Dangerous", and P-Funk elder Bernie Worrell's clavinet lending its funky gurgle to "Holy Water", the overall impression is akin to Was (Not Was) straying into Caribbean climes, a conceptual funk outfit seduced by island fun and frisky rhythms.
That's most clearly evident on the strutting "Time To Bounce", whose electro-matic dancehall style recalls Philip "Fattis" Burrell and Steely & Clevie, while a sterling cover of Lee Perry's classic "Soul Fire" provides Mystic Bowie with his most expansive platform. With Pettigrew contributing his best Marvin Gaye impression to "Surrender", and Tina Weymouth bringing a more relaxed, sensual approach to "Love To Love You Baby", the result is, surprisingly, one of the feel-good albums of the summer.. STEREO MC'S Thanks to the mobile-phone boom and the attendant ubiquity of ads featuring "Connected", it hardly seems as if the Stereo MC's have been away at all. But it has been nine long years since the album of that name hoisted them into the charts, during which period, apparently, they've been constantly making music, albeit none deemed worthy of release. You'd never guess it from Deep Down & Dirty, which in effect carries on directly from where they left off, with no evidence of either development or dissipation: Nick "the Head" Hallam still blends his samples with infectious grace, Owen If still cranks the grooves along with smooth, 24-valve propulsion, and Rob Birch still has the appearance of a man engaged in a life-or-I-forget-what-it-was struggle to smoke up all the world's ganja So, no change there, then. Nor, too, in the band's songwriting style, which still leans heavily on Birch's ability to come up with simple catchphrase lyrics, as on the title track's refrain.
With the Kick Horns peppering the riffs of tracks such as "Breeze" and "Graffiti Pt 1" with syncopated stabs of brass, the results are, if anything, even more irresistible than before, eschewing the fussy indulgences of recent UK dance styles such as jungle and two-step in favour of tried-and-tested dancefloor-filling funk-house grooves such as the majestic "Running", which swaggers along with the narcotic momentum of early Black Grape.. At a time when most bands, both British and American, seek little more than to persuade listeners of the all-consuming, solipsistic depths of their misery, it takes a brave group indeed to open their debut album with the line, "My dealer drives a three-wheeler". Compared to this image of the Del-Boys and Rodneys of the Valleys puttering about dealing draw from their Reliant Robin, the likes of Limp Bizkit seem more pompous than ever "rolling, rolling, rolling" along in their ridiculous "Urban Assault Vehicle". It's not the last time that the drug culture gets a mention on Songs Of Ignorance, but it's entirely typical of the MTH songwriter Matthew Evans's whimsical take on life in provincial Britain, with drugs treated lightly as an aspect of everyday life, and dotty dole-bound musings upon such matters as the variations in limbs between fish, birds and mammals, or the attractions of Welsh-language TV channel S4C.
