The Chemical Brothers may have Saturday night taken care of with the brash, broody and bruising beats of "Push The Button", but Sunday morning clearly belongs to the relaxed grooves of Lemon Jelly’s third LP. Three years since "Lost Horizons", Fred Deakin and Nick Franklin’s easy-on-the-ear electronica is still the perfect soundtrack for flicking through the newspapers with a pot of coffee and a fuzzy head.
Not much seems to have changed in Lemon Jelly’s brightly coloured, wibbly wobbly ambient world. A little less humour perhaps. Definitely less of the toddler friendly, nursery rhyme-style delivery. But while the duo may have grown-up and got a tad serious, their musical tastes remain as eclectic as ever. Indeed, they may have delved even deeper into their record collections than before with "64 –95", so-called because they have lifted samples from a wide variety of songs recorded between the years 1964 and 1995.
Hence we hear looped snippets from U.S. metal band Masters Of Reality, fine Maori singer John Rowles, Scottish post-punk outfit The Scars, Seventies pop duo Gallagher & Lyle, classical vocal group The King Singers and UK R&B star Terri Walker. Not to mention the voice of Captain Kirk himself William Shatner – hailed as ‘godlike genius’ on the sleevenotes, Shatner is repaying the favour after the Jellies guested on his "Has Been" album last year.
Despite the wide range of musical styles used here, each one is absorbed into that unique Jellies sound, smoothed and polished almost beyond recognition into a sumptuous, unthreatening ambient groove with echoes of The Orb, Groove Armada and Zero 7.
Blissful, cut and paste beats for the morning after…
