Music To Shake’n’Shuffle To… May or may not be meant in the iPhone sense

Review: Johnny5thWheel&thecowards – Music To Shake’n’Shuffle To

Published on October 26th, 2012 | Jonny Abrams

Love, Scott Walker, Super Furry Animals, Pavement, The Flaming Lips, The Beatles, Brian Wilson… – this northwestern group’s stated influences run remarkably close to constituting Rocksucker’s fantasy festival line-up, and yet we sense one glaring omission.

“In My Laboratory”, the opening track of this utterly splendid collection of psych-baroque-folk-pop-whateverness (and their second LP, since you ask), is so spiritually aligned with early Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci that we almost wouldn’t be surprised upon our next listen of 20 or Bwyd Time to find it there, on the track list, suddenly and mysteriously, like a face in a painting in a particularly creepy Edgar Allan Poe tale.

Or something.

Basically, if Professor Wheeto wrote songs, there’s a decent chance he’d have come up with “In My Laboratory” by now; it’s goofy, ever so slightly sinister, and ends with freaked-out ranting the likes of which makes it easy to overlook how fabulously well put together the whole thing is, not least those lush yet sinister breakdowns of harmony.

We used the word ‘sinister’ twice there, didn’t we? Well, that’s just as well, because now we don’t have to use it again to describe the ensuing “Yes That’s Right We’re Stealing Your Soul” (lyrical caveat: “…but you were pissing it down the drain”). Instead we can point out how it sounds a bit like The Coral and/or The Zutons soundtracking a 1960s B movie, one in which the starring role is played by Timeless and features only a brief walk-on part from Derivative.

Er…or something.

Quite aside from making a bold play for Song Title of the Year, “Happy Clappy Doom Jazz” sums up with “I learned to drive in the hope that cars would stop me walking back to you” the kind of twisted logic that makes Johnny5thWheel&thecowards so gosh darn brilliant, the kind of brilliant that can declare “I’m no shiny shiny, happy clappy, ippy dippy, namby pamby child of love”, throw in an ace brass section and generally come across like some music hall-ish Kinks cut from the late ’60s. Rocksucker loves this kind of brilliant, and so should you.

The delights keep on coming: we get the sweet, plinky duet “Conversations With You When You’re Not There”, the sly, jazzy shuffle of “Where Did I Sleep Last Night?”, the beautiful singing saw of “Blame in Campodia” (anything to do with Ivan Campo?), and the aptly titled “My Finest Hour”, which features inquisitively swaying accordion (courtesy of Sotones label mate Anja McCloskey?) and such wonderful lines, all wrapped up in Richard Lomax’s gentle croon, as “The line betwixt beast and man has never been more blurrily defined / As when stout and red wine are mixed”…and “It’s not my finest hour / It’s pretty far from my finest hour / And it’ll still be not my finest hour ’til my next not my finest hour”…

…and “I appear to have made a gentleman’s mess / That sounds like bad sex / And who wants to hear bad sex? / Not even them that’s having it”…and there’s even a reference to 5th June, which just so happens to be this writer’s birthday…oh, and a magnificently campy sustained note on “tell me, when that will beeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” at the end…and…and…

We could go on about the similar levels of total aceness permeating the Pulp-ishly paranoid ambience of “Nancy” (albeit Jarvis Cocker never spoke of a talking hairy eyeball, at least to our recollection), the gorgeously harmonic pop march of “Daemon” (“If I could have one birthday wish, it’s that your daemon and mine could get it together”), the “aunty’s cat” with “its fair share of problems” of “I’m Not West”…and then it’s all brought to a close by the berserk a capella chanting of “Following the Wheel [part IV]”.

And not a single track runs over 4.16 minutes! More pop albums like this please, 2013, and less like…you know, the stuff that actually shifts units in this messed up universe of ours. Fortunately for the offenders, Music To Shake’n’Shuffle To leaves Rocksucker sufficiently good-willed not to name names.

Rocksucker says: Four Quails out of Five!

a quail a quail a quail a quail

Music To Shake’n’Shuffle To is out now on Sotones. For more information, please visit www.followthewheel.co.uk

Click here to read Rocksucker’s interview with Richard Lomax of Johnny5thWheel&thecowards

Artists: johnny5thwheelandthecowards

About the Author

Jonny Abrams Editor of Rocksucker and the website's founder, Jonny is passionate about the music he listens to, both good and bad, as well as interviewing his favourite musicians.