Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 02/07/07
Label: Sequel Records

Whatever it says on the cover, this isn't really a Happy Mondays record. If you take non-musician Bez out of the equation, more than half the original line-up is missing. The most significant absentee is guitarist Mark Day, whose playing was the spiciest sonic ingredient in the Mondays' potent stew of funk, acid house, indie and psych-rock. Ask your bedroom-guitarist mate to play "Kinky Afro"; he can't, because Day made sounds not heard from a six-string before or since.

The guy's sorely missed, which brings us to the other thing that stops this being a real Happy Mondays record: the fact that it's not brilliant. Let's not patronise Shaun Ryder by saying it's "surprisingly good". This man was at the helm of "Bummed" (as good a rock record as anyone has made) and he deserves to be judged by the highest standards. The truth is that "Uncle Dysfunktional" finds him a shadow of his former self. It's possible to pinpoint the moment when Ryder jumped the shark: that was when Black Grape, the vehicle for his Lazarus-like mid-'90s comeback, released their second album.

Appropriately titled "Stupid Stupid Stupid"Ryder has endured endless problems of the legal, narcotic and personal varieties, and these haven't done much for his creativity. A solo album found him delivering rambling drug tales in the style of a Mancunian Grampa Simpson, and here he fares only a little better. There is the odd moment where he locates his gift for strangely phrased lyrical gems ("She's eating concrete!" he yells at one point), but all too often he falls back on aforementioned addled drug-speak and lame wordplay, with attempts to pun on the name Andy Warhol proving particularly unsuccessful.

Maturity is the last thing we expect or want from Shaun Ryder, but he needs to reign in his juvenile fascination with bodily fluids: as it is, songs such as "Deviants" remind you not of the Shaun Ryder who triumphantly sneered his way through "Pills'N'Thrills And Bellyaches", but of the one who wrote a column for The Daily Sport. While Ryder leers and menaces, his band mates, ace drummer Gaz Whelan among them, mount a doomed attempt to imitate the inimitable.

Taking their cue more from 1992's disappointingly slick "Yes! Please" than from earlier, grimier material, they excel just once: on opener "Jellybean". Built around Ryder's trans-gender fantasies, "Jellybean" has a triumphant sweep that for fleetingly evokes the magic of the past. But ultimately, "Uncle Dysfunktional" won't compel a new generation to discover the back catalogue or question the popular depiction of the Mondays as cartoonish buffoons. It's a real shame. Still, at least Shaun Ryder is actually alive to make it.

    by Niall O'Keeffe