Album review: A Band Called Quinn – The Beggar’s Opera
The story goes that after being spotted at a club night featuring a mixture of acts including psychics and burlesque puppeteers (a kind of Glasgow’s Got Talent?) Glaswegian quintet A Band Called Quinn hooked up with theatre company Vanishing Point in a futuristic vision of The Beggar’s Opera which received mix reviews. On the back of this the band decided to release the songs from the show. Immediately this presents a problem; an album featuring songs from a show is only going to mean something to those that have seen it, and as it didn’t make Broadway or the West End I’m going to assume that isn’t going to be a huge amount of people. To those that haven’t, a group to which I belong, it’s really just a bunch of songs but, I hear you ask, are they good songs?
A Band Called Quinn are first and foremost an electro pop band but as these are ‘show’ tunes there is some variety in the tracks, though maybe not enough. They certainly wear their influences on their sleeves and through most of this album the ghost of Madonna past makes its presence known. In fact bar a couple of songs, most notably ‘We Are The Scum’ which sounds like Suede and the vampish ‘History’, if I didn’t know better I could have mistaken ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ for a Madonna album but more ‘Dick Tracy’ than ‘Like A Prayer’ and that pretty much sums it up; Madonna lite. 2/5
Mark Cousens
Ou now on Tromolo Records
www.myspace.com/abandcalledquinn
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