Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Warp Records Have Done It Again, 5 Dec 2000
By A Customer
Yet another excellent record produced by warp records ... After havin been amazed with all three Nightmares on Wax albums I searched the dance collections thoroughly to find another group that tickled my ears ... and here they are. Despite not being quite as abstract and chilled as the Nightmares on Wax stuff this cd proved to be a very hard driving relaxing mixture of rythms from start to finish, leaving me looking fowards to settling down with a copy of Making Bones and Our Aim is to Satisfy. Tunes to look out for on the disc are definitely: Lo-Beam & Fatboy's Dust
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic, 18 Oct 2006
This was always one of my favourite mid-90s albums, but it was more or less overlooked at the time, and even now I don't think Red Snapper have ever been particularly well-known. This is a pity, because Prince Blimey is a superb album. Its organic blend of jazz, funk, ambient and mid-90s break-beats has aged extremely well indeed, and, despite being a predominantly instrumental album, it deserves to be ranked alongside sample-heavy classics of the era such as Exit Planet Dust, Maxinquaye and Endtroducing DJ Shadow.
Despite the fact that the tracks are quite sparse- structured around Ali Friend's throbbing double bass and Richard Thair's stridently funky drumming- the smoky, atmospheric sound is both varied and textured, through the judicious use of samples, as well as touches of sax and slide guitar. In fact, the musical arrangements are extremely subtle, which prevents the music from ever succumbing to the mind-numbing repetitiveness which damns a lot of mid 90s dance music. Furthermore, there is a great deal of stylistic variety. The opener Crusoe Takes a Trip, with its backwards-sounding bassline and frenetic break-beat, tips a nod to the drum'n'bass prevalent at the time, but still sounds distinctively Red Snapper nonetheless through the eerie keyboards and shrill sax breaks. Get Some Sleep Tiger is fast-paced, straight-ahead 50s jazz, whereas Thomas the Fib and Fatboy's Dust slink along like some kind of mutant jazz/hip-hop crossover, propelled by Friend's pizzicato bass playing. Space Sickness is little more than a (superb) drum solo with minimal arrangement, yet it works perfectly. Even the sole vocal track, The Paranoid, avoids sounding like filler. In fact, its one of the album's highlights, through its superb marriage of Anna Haigh's vocal with the strident, darkly funky rhythm laid down once again by Friend and Thair, which is perfectly complemented by touches of keyboard and latin-sounding guitar.
The album finishes strongly too. The Last One is a slightly barmy, odd-ball track which grows on you, but the album's centre-piece is undoubtedly Digging Doctor What What- a subtle, expansive, yet riotously funky number, it sounds like Can updated via the Chemical Brothers- here Ali Friend and Richard Thair seem to vie with one another in order to pump out the funkiest, most frenetic groove possible. Its the kind of track that would fill any dancefloor in seconds. The listener needs a rest after all that, and its provided by the beautiful, ambient Gridlock, which acts as perfect balm to soothe you after the funky excesses of the preceding track. Then, to round off, the stately closer Lo-Beam brings things to a satisfying conclusion.
After this album, Red Snapper would move to a cleaner (and blander) more dance-oriented sound, but its this dark, smoky brand of mutant jazz which they ought to be remembered for.
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