Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Growing up in England in the Ford Cortina Decade, 18 Nov 2006
My instant reaction on the first listen was the worst thing is that a couple of the tracks are almost boring. If anyone else had produced them, they would be shocking, but for Haines they seem predictable, almost safe. Given my own peculiar tastes, I will lap up any repetition of his old themes such as pointing out the brutal underside of England, the divisions of class and the faux romance of crime, but lyrically scant new ground is broken. It is the same musically.
Aside from some ill-advised nods to English music hall tradition, it is the expected mix of guitars, sly seventies' references, retro synth, the odd bit of cello, delicate, entrancing pop sensibilities and one dance-orientated track.
However, typical Haines also means a display of genius and bravery. No one else around has the guts/ill taste (strike as you feel appropriate) to tackle subjects such as the Yorkshire Ripper and the abusive, grooming potential of pop stardom. No other songwriter is honest enough to deal with the grim nature of growing up in England in the Ford Cortina decade; to remind us it was dominated by a poverty of perspective and a wilful, tacky glossing over of its moments of utter darkness.
There are songs on Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop I know I will grow to love. I already adore the frightening mix of crashing guitar, terrace stomp and tinkling piano of Leeds United with its final chilling refrain of: `The North, the North/Where we do what we want'. The mordant autopsies of deceased Englishness in All The English Devils and Here's To Old England have me semi-seduced. How can you not feel affection for a song with the lines: 'Here's to old England/Sliced white bread and milky tea/Sarcasm, a well-developed sense of irony'? The anti-New Age hymn Secret Yoga is achingly beautiful, its razor-blade lyric almost hidden amongst its pop glamour.
The whole album drips with Haines' sneering, caustic vocal style, bringing out the full menace and irony of each song. If the price to pay for yet another scathing, anti-nostalgia masterpiece from Haines is a sense of familiarity with his previously established gift, then it is a price worth paying.
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15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How he still loves the bootboys..., 19 Nov 2006
Luke Haines follows the career compilation `Luke Haines is Dead' with the wonderfully titled `Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop,' which in many ways feels like a successor to Seventies-themed Auteurs' album `How I Learned to Love the Bootboys.' As the knowing few will tell you, Luke Haines is one of the great contemporary songwriters, with a back-catalogue of releases as The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof and Black Box Recorder to prove it, as well as his great solo debut `The Oliver Twist Manifesto.' Imagine if the Divine Comedy weren't so irritatingly ironic, student-friendly and had the savvy of Ray Davies and Mark E Smith and you might be near...
Luke Haines' universe is a special one, filled with terrorists, gangsters, serial killers, fascists, the English motorway system, and an extended cast of unsavoury characters - many of whom are here. Haines likes pop - Billie Piper's `Honey to the B' apparently being model for BBB's top 20 hit `The Facts of Life', while he is apparently cited Falco in relation to the Richard X-remix of `Leeds United.' Despite the 1970s-theme the music has an 80s feel, the keyboards on the opening title track reminding me of something like Freeez or Frazier Chorus, though there is a riff that sounds like a 1970s one hit wonder to me. People forget the 1970s, buying into the `Life on Mars'-version of it - Haines, like Morrissey, doesn't appear to have got over it, and is here to remind us all, notably on the hilarious `Here's to Old England', which is the missing link between `English Scheme' and a certain era of XTC.
`Leeds United' taps into the vibe of David Peace's novels, notably his recent `The Damned United' (the kind of book Martin Amis should have shoved down his trachea) and the Yorkshire Ripper-alluding book in his 1970s-sequence. Allusions to the Queen, Peter Sutcliffe (the taste free opening line "When I get home, my wife will kill me"), World of Sport, Jimmy Saville, and the West Yorkshire Police abound. It's as funny as Mark E Smith's world around `The NWRA' and `Winter.' It's catchy pop, all topped off with the anthemic "The North, the North/Where we do what we want/The North, the North/Where we do what we like." In the ideal world, the Richard X-produced single version would be an international uber smash...
The list world, which sadly I have contributed to, apparent since 1999 is too much- the Mojo-driven endless looking back that centres on the Top100 Best Albums of All Time, VH1 specials interviewing Vernon Kay and Patty Hearst on their favourite albums, and the endless deluxe reissues. Mr Haines does not buy it, "Crosby Stills & Nash, the legacy of the Clash/I can't take much more." This is why I hate the Beatles. The retro rhetorics are too much most of the time, though I am waiting for the VH1 Throbbing Gristle retrospective. The amusing riff from Blondie's `Rip Her to Shreds' appears, a deliberate reference like that of `Sugar Baby Love' in `The Rubettes', or `Superstition' in `There's Gonna Be An Accident.'
The rest of the album is as fantastic, as sharp as recent material by the Magnetic Fields, The Russian Futurists, and Sparks - this is what Denim should have sounded like! `The Walton Hop' and `Fighting in the City Tonight' are catchy numbers, the former nodding to disgraced pop-pundit paedophile Jonathan King; while the latter applies to now as much as the 1970s (the keyboard on `Walton' reminds me of early B52s). The subject matter remains as dubious, from `All the English Devils' (which suggests Haines should write a musical), to the Krays-themed `Freddie Mills is Dead' (is the `dead Fred/dead Fred' bit meant to allude to `Bela Lugosi's Dead'!!!), and `Bad Reputation', whose taste-free chorus tells us "Gary Glitter/He's a bad bad man/Ruining the reputation of the Glitter Band!"
`Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop' is definitely one of the albums of 2006 and joins the mass of great albums Mr Haines has been associated with. I have my fingers crossed for a successor to the Baader Meinhof album, the kind of record that Tony Blair will legislate against. Until then another classic from Luke Haines, who is rather enjoyable live and you really ought to see with his BBB-cohort John Moore, whose `Expressway Rising' you should avoid, as his `Half Awake' you should buy...
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Grinch is Back, 1 Nov 2006
More nauseous despatches from the trenches of modern Britain in another superb album from Haines. Off My Rocker...is sonically cleaner and, ostensibly at least, more upbeat than Haines's typical fare but the lyrical concerns fester as viciously as ever: the decline of the English sensibility, the mad carnival of post-war Britain, the malignant triumphs of the misfits and the morlocks. A typical example of the mix is Leeds United, in which the Yorkshire Ripper watches football from the terraces, dreaming of murders that are as much his weekly treat as visits to the pub and World of Sport are for the men around him, all set to a mock-glam rock that's by turns exultant and sinister. Doomed boxer Freddie Mills, Jimmy Saville, Jonathan King, the "middle-age rampage" of heritage rock - all swim into view in this elegantly punchy, musically sumptuous album that, like everything Haines produces, lingers long in the mind like a worrying letter from overseas.
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