Album review: The Big Pink – Tapes
Ah, the mixtape. The teenage boy’s number one weapon in an arsenal compiled to win over the girl of his dreams. The mixtape was a lovingly compiled carefully chosen compilation of songs that were not only unbelievably cool but also gave an insight into your personality, generally emphasising your sensitive side. If you were really lucky it might even contain a song or two that was relevant to you and the target of your affections. Of course in real terms such things no longer exist, cassettes are almost extinct and putting together a selection of mp3s involves so little effort that it’s just not as impressive. Nonetheless Milo Cordell from London electro rock duo The Big Pink has decided to give it a go, and so tries to woo us with his own mixtape ‘Tapes’.
Cordell apparently found many of the 17 tracks while trawling Myspace and as such some of them here are so new they haven’t even been released yet – now that’s upping the cool ante! Being that this has been compiled by a member of the Big Pink it is no surprise that the tracks here are all electronica in some form or other but mostly dance orientated. However there are two problems here.
Firstly the quality of the tracks is varied and unfortunately most of them are at the bottom end of the scale. Some of them, especially opening track ‘Slow Dancing’ by Grill Grill, don’t even seem to have a discernible melody, while others, like Balam Acab’s ‘See Birds’ are just repetitive noise. It’s not all bad though, I really like ‘Let Go’ by JJ, ‘Ego War’ by Gang Gang Dance is pretty good, and the bizarre ‘No Bra’ by Minger has some interesting percussion though I’m not sure what household objects they’re using to produce it. The best track by far though is ‘Shallow Tears’ by Light Asylum who are probably the only band here that I would actively seek to hear more from.
The other problem that ‘Tapes’ has is that it is disjointed, with so many of the tracks being dance tracks I really would have expected it to flow better. A nice Milo, but if you want to get to second base you’re gonna have to try harder! 2/5
Mark Cousens
Out now on !K7
Buy Big Pink CDs from hmv
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