Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 16/01/06
Label: Domino

With the whole world detoxing for the New Year, what better time for music that also eschews saturated fats and other unhealthy excesses. You want raw, lean, wholegrain, sugar-free rock'n'roll? Open wide.

The somewhat unlikely official story behind this latest gang of skinny-jeaned noisemongers has it that The Beautiful New Born Children sent an anonymous demo to Domino (why would you bother?) prompting a frenzied Google-assisted effort to track them down. It would be exciting to think this meant they were the hush-hush side project of, say, one of Blink 182, but in reality BNBC are the side project of Michael Beckett, sometime member of artsy Teutonic electronicists Schneider TM. Unfairly, we admit, this adds an unwelcome 'geeks-go-mad' angle that can't help but make the whole enterprise feel ever so slightly contrived.

On first impressions, "Hey People" is an energising 22-minute blast of loud, fast MC5-inspired garage of the revivalist ilk that has so dominated the opening years of this decade. It's not just retro, it's doubly retro. It takes off with "Do The Do", a speeded-up rockabilly riff with shouting and a slowly increasing thread of fuzz and feedback, before rushing into the bouncy "Paper Mill", which might be "Parklife" as presented by a slightly under-the-weather Iggy Pop. Bawled, bawdy, euphoric drug ode "A Good Dose""Surfer Rosa" and "Is This It".

On the subject of The Strokes, Beckett's delivery, recorded in tinny transistor-radio style, owes so much to Julian Casablancas - hell, so does the entire album - you know exactly what he's been listening to between laptop noodling sessions. It all finally collapses with free-form six minute rumpus "Up And Down And Round And Round", the perfect soundtrack to a wife-swapping party round at Sid and Nancy's.

Yet there's something about the determinedly primal recording techniques and clunky, 'we-just-learnt-this-today!' instrumentation that doesn't ring true - think those boarding school kids from Channel 4's "Rock School" but without the youth, freshness, bravery or innocence. And knowing that their day job involves sophisticated soundsculpting and raising the next generation (they all have "beautiful children, though only one of them is new born" it says here) compounds this unease. You can virtually hear them stage-whispering to each other: "Ruder! Dumber!" in the hope the hausfrau next door will start furiously hammering on the wall with her ladle.

Good, clean, healthy fun, then - but by February 1st you'll be hungering for something more substantial.

    by Anna Britten