Various Artists - Attic Jam (The Attic)
4/5
By: Alex Lee Thomson
Compilations are all the rage these days and none so precious as a well conceived and put together one, this being as exciting as a broken fairground ride that you know could kill you at any moment or finding out your new guitar hero is a late minute addition to the Basement Club night.
Taking you through some of the tracks, the first is a let down only because The Kooks spit out version of 'Ooh La' is as shoddy here as it was on their debut album and each and every poor quality show they've done in the past two years. Luckily the album's struck back a vibrant beam of majestic light in the shape of Ed Harcourt who's acoustic wonderment in 'Last Cigarette' harks to Damien Rice while Ed's own eager individualistic prowess balls through with some strained violins and a sense of summer nights on Italian verandas. Ed's one of our finest assets in terms of contributions to this genre of music and he never fails to deliver.
Martha Wainwright, a voice we've missed since her foray with Snow Patrol on their best tune to date, pops her dramatic stance forward with a playful Spektor-like ode 'These Flowers'. It's an honest and profoundly evoking song but fails to really shove a pitchfork up your sternum like Raconteurs cover of 'The Seeker', a song that reminds us why The White Stripes were so fantastic. Pete Townshend, puppet master of this project along with Rachel Fuller (wife to PT and accomplished songwriter in her own right), appears in 'The Seeker' as a guest vocalist as he does in one of the albums flashiest moments, 'Photobooth' by Death Cab For Cutie. If The Raconteurs is the self-possessed energy of the album, Death Cab are undoubtedly the tasteful heart of the piece.
As the tracks were recorded during the making of Fuller's online chat show there's a relaxed vibe to all the music on the album which doesn't have the same in-yer-face clout as the Radio 1 Live Lounge compilation and dear God is it all the better for it. A ramshackle and unrehearsed, unpolished ambiance relates itself to the music directly and as a sense of community comes through with the albums central characters providing a plot to the whole thing allowing it to flow and gain a sense of appeal to lovers of acoustic in its purest form.
The Fratellis and Razorlight are some of the more unlikely of heroes on 'Attic Jam' but both provide great songs that force you to re-evaluate what you thought about them, the highest attained principle of such a work and as much as you can walk into this with preconceptions of why, in detail, you hate Razorlight, after the delicate 'What's It All About' there's question.
Editors 'All Sparks' works well here but lacks anything over what we've already heard from the roughly alike version found on the abovementioned Radio 1 mix and as such loses the albums tempo fairly early on having to be saved by the enigmatic grace of Fullers own vocals on 'Blue'. Anybody not already familiar with Fuller with find another reason to go back to this assemblage time and time again as the comprehensive and well tuned harmonies throughout 'Blue' reminisce Eva Cassidy in a discerning and admirable way. Artists like The Magic Numbers, Regina Spektor and The Zutons feel and sound right at home and play off the back of each other to fill the mid album with a frolicsome cocktail of hippy-happy love makin' kitsh 60s-esque astuteness. Regina's tiny song 'Musicbox' shows the albums ambition and bravery to be matchless showcasing true rarities and one-off tunes over bog standard acoustic versions that would ordinarily be commonplace on a project like this. Heck, even The Zutons manage to do something fresh, a far stride away from the disappointment of their second LP that had us all writhing in disenchantment last year.
The single best reason to buy this album though, and all sins (few as they are) forgiven, is The Flaming Lips featuring ol' Pete again. This is the reason the album works and why Pete had to be a massive part of it as 'Baba O'Riley' (a.k.a. 'Teenage Wasteland' as it appears here) breaches the boundary between new age super bands and the greatest performance group in history; The Who. The original is great, we don't think anybody could challenge that, but with the whimsical charm of The Flaming Lips eccentricities there's nowhere else to go but to the land of satisfaction. You can enjoy this song for hours on end and still be in love with it, and maybe the album would still be as fulfilling without it, but it's there and for whatever reason, it makes it.
'Attic Jam' is the fruits of years of hard work by Fuller and Townshend and every second has been well spent as the mix-masterful masterpiece is beyond anything we've heard before and although it'll probably fail to make many waves as far as a mass consensus into its genius is concerned, possibly because it's only available as a download from iTunes, it's worth your time and indeed hard earned dosh. You'll never hear anything this magical (at least not in the same way) again.
Artists in this article: Various Artists
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