Literal chap, isn't he?
This is indeed Nottingham musician Richard Warren's second album for Mute Records, but third in total. (His debut appeared on Pointblank in 1988.)
The first suffered from a lack of consistency. Faced with the almost limitless scope the recording studio gives to one of Warren's imagination looking to synthesise electronic pop with dance patterns and rock and virtually everything in-between, it ended up often bewildering the listener. You could compare 'Volume 1' with Kraftwerk, Chemical Brothers, Bruce Springsteen and Stereolab and still not be far awry.
Fortunately, Warren's learning curve is steep. 'Volume2' may be impossible to pin down in terms of musical genres -is it rock, dance, dub, electronica?- but it has a most becoming fluidity.
Wind-blown melodicas and tinkling piano sounds mix in with hard-edged drum patterns and brief
flurries of funky guitars to create a lithe, writhing whole. 'Circulation' is on a slow-burning fuse, while 'Telstar Recovery' starts slowly like a train shunting out of a tunnel, before exploding into a distorted mix of blown-apart vocals and heavy guitar.
As we're here, we may as well throw another couple of comparison points into the mix -the warm humanity of naive Japanese pop group Maher Shalal Hash Baz ('Siobhan') and Black Grape's riotous accord ('Kelly's Truck').
This is a mighty fine record indeed.
