Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 17/03/08
Label: Lex

In 1980, a camp and fairly useless swords and sorcery flick called "Hawk The Slayer", starring Jack Palance, Roy Kinnear, Bernard Bresslaw and Annette Crosbie (a dream panto cast if ever there were one), was released to little acclaim. The movie's sole redeeming feature was its bizarre soundtrack, which blended synthetic disco beats with Ennio Morricone-style western orchestration to produce a type of music that's rarely been revisited since - cheesy yet strangely avant-gard, futuristic yet held together by sticky tape and safety pins, plastic yet striving for its own singular authenticity.

"Neon Theme", the opening track on this collaboration between producer Boom Bip and Super Furry Animals' singer Gruff Rhys, remembers "Hawk The Slayer" very well. It has the same self-consciously spooky synth stabs, the same portentous, cabaret doomy bass parts, and wooshy sci-fi sounds that probably felt like the 21st century back at the start of The Decade That Style Forgot. Track two, "Dream Cars", probably wanted to be called "Together In Electric Dreams", only Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder got there first. It glides magnificently and, once again, would have sounded like the future a very long time ago.

What is this? Retro-futurism? You'd think so, were it not for the fact that these '80s touchstones are all very now, scattered through pop culture from Justin Timberlake to Hot Chip. This is plugging into the past to tap into the present - not so much retro-futurism as nostalgadelia, the deliberate and very knowing filtering of yesterday's comforting sounds through a contemporary kaleidoscope. "I Told Her On Alderaan", for example, contains the squiggliest and cheesiest synth sounds imaginable. But if you reference something cheesy in a cool and post-modern fashion, does it remain cheesy? Or become cool?

Lyrically, "Stainless Style" is supposedly a concept about John DeLorean, the engineer who inspired "Back To The Future". Yet more '80s revisionism? Or just too much post-modernism for one record? The interesting theme doesn't last anyway. "Trick For Treat" and "Sweat Shop" offer booty-shaking electro and either force Rhys into an unconvincing falsetto or the background. Strangely the collaboration works best when neither side is really to the fore - when it doesn't sound like Boom Bip drowning out Gruff or the bloke from the Super Furries wading through squelches and bad bass lines - but when the whole thing just takes off and you forget who's involved.

Does this make Neon Neon a success? Your Yahoo! scribe says no, with the same suspicious reaction that first met Hot Chip or Sugababes sampling Gary Numan. It's still cheese, no matter the new context. There's a beautiful moment during the last song, "Stainless Style", when harmonies swell unexpectedly and the music becomes like stardust in slow motion. It doesn't sound like a raised eyebrow from two decades ago. It doesn't sound like anything at all.

    by Ian Watson