Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 22/06/09
Label: V2

With graduate employment prospects looking about as rosy as anything else in this current financial apocalypse, Wesleyan University in Connecticut, USA, must be thankful that their alumni are practically guaranteed elbow room in Brooklyn New York's burgeoning post-psychedelic melting pot, subsequent major label riches and probable worldwide notoriety. Following the '80s-pop slickness of Boy Crisis, cutesy iPod-soundtracking of Chairlift and the scene's garishly dressed-up crown princes MGMT, come the awfully monikered but just about as superior as they claim to be Amazing Baby.

Comparisons with platinum-selling trailblazers MGMT are necessary, not least because of the shared campus, but also because of their composition (two whacked-out hippie-looking lynchpins, assisted by further band members live) and the clear audible similarities; the future-tribal "Roverfrenz", forcefully baggy "Deerripper" and spaced-out "Dead Light" could make easy, unobtrusive appearances on "Oracular Spectacular", particularly if you slowed their pulse a little.

But MGMT are too often handicapped by their own po-faced seriousness, cutting live performances down to a tediously routine critical mass where you rather expected technicolor somersaults off the rings of Jupiter. Amazing Baby are cut from a rougher cloth altogether. They have a head chocked full of fantasy, but their reality is rooted in a more traditional mode of hedonism; tight rehearsal spaces and amps ramped up to 11. There's a gleefully fluid rock'n'roll dynamic driving this whole record, more evocative of modern-day US psychedelic reprobates The Dandy Warhols or The Brain Jonestown Massacre, rather than students trying to be clever.

This traditionalist base doesn't mean they don't throw everything at this album, because really they do. There are string sections and horns, endless layers of vocal harmonies, tonnes of reverb, the entire '70s regurgitated in one way or another, sounding as frazzled as a Super Furry Animals New Year's Eve party after the absinthe and flying saucers come out, each song a heady and specific ad-hoc cocktail.

"The Narwhal" is a Led Zeppelin/Chemical Brothers twister, "Pump Yr Brakes" Black Rebel Motorcycle's "Spread Your Love" with a Gruff Rhys head, "Old Tricks In Hell" is Jesus & Mary Chain consumed by Flaming Lips, "Headdress" like Bernard Butler and Animal Collective attacking the Spiders From Mars and the crunchy glam pulsar "Kankra" is Doves' "Pounding" forced face-first through Beck, T-Rex, Pink Floyd and New York Dolls filters.

If Wesleyan college leavers were to start getting proper jobs tomorrow then it's entirely possible that they saved the best for last.

    by James Berry