Cornershop
Handcream for a Generation
[V2; 2002]
Rating: 7.6
Dance party at the United Nations! Relaxing after a long session
hammering out trade sanctions, human rights accords, and peacekeeping
missions, the delegates have retired to the local disco for a night
of lettin' loose and puttin' their weight on it! On one side
of the dance floor, the British and French delegates are ignoring
centuries of rivalry in order to do a mean freak nasty on each other.
Representatives from Russia, Peru, and Laos rope people into doing
the Electric Slide. People form a circle around the delegate from
Syria, who is giving a full ceremonial dress demonstration of his
reputed breakdancing prowess.
If these throwdowns really do occur down at the old UN, the DJ has no
doubt been primarily spinning Handcream for a Generation, the
latest release from London-by-way-of-India Cornershop. This album,
with its effortless genre-hopping and EPCOT cultural sampling, is the
most globalist musical statement since Michael Jackson's video for
"Black or White"-- though, uh, minus the crotch-grabbing and car-smashing.
Ringleader Tjinder Singh has spent the last five years throwing
musical influences from every region of the planet into his giant
melting pot, ending up with a record so multi-culti it's received
funds from the World Bank and been name-dropped in a Sunday column by
Thomas Friedman.
That Cornershop would be the band to take this "It's a Small World"
approach is no big surprise, given the poly-ethnic nature of their
previous records for David Byrne's Luaka Bop imprint. The band broke
out of the world music ghetto with 1997's When I Was Born for the
7th Time, an album that delighted in throwing traditional Indian
heritage and instrumentation up against pretty much every Western
music style in the book. Somewhat overrated by the sitar-happy
critical population, 7th Time nevertheless had a handful of
great, inventive pop songs ("Brimful of Asha," "Good to Be On the
Road Back Home Again") amidst an overabundance of interesting-once-or-twice
sound collage filler and a gimmicky Punjabi "reclamation" of "Norwegian
Wood."
Handcream, by comparison, is even more of a shape-shifter than
its acclaimed predecessor, and likewise, it's less uneven and cohesive.
Changing outfits as often as a runway model, Cornershop jumps from
soul-funk roll call intro to children's choir-accompanied synth-rock
to glowstick-waving house to organ-loop hip-hop to Jamaican reggae
dub, and that's only counting up to the halfway point. It's an
exhilarating but disorienting ride, given the big budget production,
the rapid-fire guest appearances (including Noel Gallagher and Rob
Swift), and a relentlessly upbeat pace tightly calibrated to provoke
shaking of the booty in all races.
Fortunately, this versatility indicates that Singh isn't looking to
further pad his bank account with a collection of profitable "Asha"
clones. Among the album's twelve tracks, only "Staging the Plaguing
of the Raised Platform" and "Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky
III" land close to their big hit's on-loan-from-Luna chord
progression and singsong melody. While neither tune has the memory
claws of "Asha" (which I'll bet five dollars is running through your
head right this second), "Raised Platform" has some delightfully
catchy nonsense lyrics about Jaws and dodos, and the thick-riffed
"Rocky" narrowly survives an appearance by that most insidious of
rock cliches, the gospel backup singer.
The rest is kept strictly mirrorball, highlighted by the Studio 54
glitter promised on Singh's politics-and-disco side project Clinton.
Upgrading that group's "People Power" from ironic bare-bones disco to
the real deal itself, the song grooves along to swear bleeps, phone
rings, and cricket chirps, promising socialism through leisure suits
and feathered boas. "The London Radar" has a similar amount of fun
with modernized Saturday Night Fever elements, soldering a
bunch of airline-related sound clips to swirling strings and popping
bass. "Music Plus One" and "Slip the Drummer One" are dance tracks
more ecstacy than cocaine, employing vocoders, synthesizers, and
turntable scratches courtesy of X-Ecutioner Swift (on loan from Linkin
Park, we see).
While these tracks are indicative of Cornershop's ability to enjoyably
replicate different eras of nightclub music, one often gets the feeling
that the band's just trying on costumes without much in the way of
original modifications. Drafting Chicago soulman Otis Clay for emcee
duties on the opening "Heavy Soup" and a Rasta for the Lee Perry homage
"Motion the 11" lends authenticity to the band's genre explorations,
but also dilutes their own sound by easing up on the Punjabi elements.
There aren't many fresh hybrid creations in the vein of 7th Time's
Automator-produced Bolly-Wu "Candy Man" here, unless you count the
cumbersome 14-minute "Spectral Mornings," which attempts to pit late
'60s Dead against Side A of The Concert for Bangladesh.
With so much stylistic hopscotch, the album feels a little disjointed
as well, despite mysterious recurring vocal samples of song titles
("slip the drummer one," "motion the eleven") popping up in unexpected
places. As multilingual, uncategorizable, culture-spanning concept
albums by artists with "Corn" in their moniker, Cornelius' Point
has Handcream beat by a long shot. But with a record so obviously
intended to make you dance first and ask questions later, such analysis
is fairly irrelevant. Tjinder Singh and Cornershop want to throw a
world party down at the discotheque, and in the wake of tragic Ally
McBeal cancellations and David Beckham injuries, dancin's probably
just what us six billion kids need.
-Rob Mitchum, May 22nd, 2002