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| Good Looking Blues,
Laika |
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| Music,
Richard Young,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F3
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On the outskirts of Indie Town in the county of Music, with borders on Jazzville and Little Electronica, lies the pleasant and scenic village of Laika. Good Looking Blues is the third album from the London based band, led by ex-Moonshake vocalist Margaret Fiedler and engineer/knob twiddler Guy Fixsen. From their impressive debut album Silver Apples of the Moon (1994) and the really rather good Sounds of the Satellites (1997), it is obvious that Laika have marked their own unique sonic territory, albeit a difficult one to categorise.
Good Looking Blues has all the trademarks of their funky, spaced out "post rock" or whatever you want to call it. Drum loops skitter along, flutes trill, Rhodes pianos and Minimoogs burble, all while Margaret half whispers, half sings her melancholy odes. From the first few seconds of the opening track, you just know this is a band that means business. Spacious and clean, yet maintaining a lo-fi edge, Black Cat Bone kicks butt. My only reservation is that by the time you get to track six, the somewhat over-indulgent Widows Weed, there has been so little contrast or tonal variation between the tracks that the album has become a bit of a blur.
The tracks don’t really go anywhere once they have kicked in, which is a shame because Laika really do make some cool sounds. The production on the drums and percussion is great, samples have been twisted and melted beyond recognition, guitars and bass are economic and understated, only this time it appears that the guys have perhaps spent too much time in their studio endlessly tinkering with sounds. It’s all a little introspective and noodly.
Listening to Good Looking Blues with headphones gets you lost in a living, breathing world of sound, only this is a world where gravity is very much in evidence, thus you remain stubbornly earthbound. I can imagine that to listen to it stoned you at least wouldn’t notice the lack of melodic meat. Laika are still one of the more interesting bands around today, but this doesn’t beat their previous offerings.
Too Pure
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