Music Reviews
The Good, The Bad & The Queen

The Good, The Bad & The Queen The Good, The Bad & The Queen

(Parlophone / Honest Jon's) Rating - 8/10

To begin things honestly, this album practically creaks from the case with the weight of its contributors' reputations. When one of the major songwriters of the last fifteen years collaborates with arguably the most iconic bassist ever, notice is taken. Add a particularly interesting, commercially successful producer and the "supergroup" tag appears. Tony Allen co-founded Afrobeat with Fela Kuti. Simon Tong? A band called the Verve...

(It's good...) It's actually pretty good. The Good, The Bad & The Queen is a fairly bleak, albeit cosmopolitan pop record. I'm a big fan of Albarn, but he has the ability to occasionally annoy and bore me with the sort of right on, divisive political correctness that insults everybody's intelligence. It's a blessing, given recent circumstances and the Clash's bent for (impressive) direct polemic, that this isn't present here. Instead we have a level headed, masterful pop critique along the lines of Modern Life Is Rubbish. There's a feeling of uncertainty and disillusionment with the current landscape and its drivers offset by arresting song structures comparable to the Specials.

The peak moments are like heaven in a basket. 80's Life fits somewhere between Paul Heaton's best with the Housemartins and 13. A Soldiers Tale deserves to be on the song of the year lists next December. It's as beautiful an evocation of same old blight as Damon has ever sung, where we "go to bed frequently lost in the woods". I can swear I'm hearing Rudy Can't Fail bass and the theme from South Pacific creeping around a picture perfect Richard Hawley scenario. Northern Whale paints a Hefner via Syd Barrett picture of a "tide end town" with "everyone hallucinating on you". Herculean allows Burton to display the processing radiance shown on Sparklehorse's Dreamt.... Simonon's inescapable punk dub lines bob through the mix on Behind the Sun and the spaghetti psychedelia of The Bunting Song. The closing title track is pure Sound of Sinners, with fervour to match. Tong's guitar sounds like it's shattering in sherbet.

As it stands, this project may well be seen as a commendable chapter in its participant's careers. At the very least, The Good, the Bad, & The Queen is a luminous footnote in the dank.