It’s difficult to look past “Tubthumping” of course, but if you do, you find a couple of decades-long sequence of catchy pop, message lyrics (sometimes obvious, sometimes explained only by the extensive notes and quotes the Chumbas provide), and skillful use of the variety of voices amongst their many members. This album then extends that sequence along all those axes – catchy tunes, new topics (or new aspects of old topics), excellent playing and singing. Highly recommended! Thank “Tubthumping” for financing another decade or two of the Chumbawamba anarchist collective’s albums, not to mention their excellent website, www.chumba.com.
1. Tying the concept of invention by Edison (whose first recording, it’s worth noting, was “Mary had a little lamb – was that copyrighted?) to that of invention by remixers and combiners of the cut-and-paste raw materials the modern media feed us today; musically average though
2. Celebrating the Biotic Baking Brigade, distributors of cream pies to the faces of the powerful worldwide; musically reminiscent of maybe a mix of better ELO with scratching
3. Ebay, recycling the world’s culture into an undifferentiated stream of generic stuff – Iraqi antiquities, “the stuff inside your houses, and that stuff behind your eyes”; sweet melody
4. Catchy tune featuring accordion with message of “you’re being lied to by the media”
5. Pretty, Spanish-flavored song about saying your piece, no matter what your line of work; sample of old man’s reminiscences of radio opening up his mind is nice
6. The vibe here is Mediterranean gypsy, and appropriately so since the message is about being on the outside, making yourself visible and audible despite the lack of channels made available to outsiders
7. Slow Cuban groove; did you know that Bacardi is one of the old-line, pre-Castro Cuban rum firms that’s made its home in the Bahamas since Castro came in, and that agitates for the Cuban embargo (as any Cuban rums will compete with theirs)?
8. Props to Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping; musically a lilting ballad with pretty violin and accordion accents
9. A folksy tune (violin and accordion prominent again); the song is about the recent emergence in the UK of Spanish- and Italian-style community centers where people take back the space to act as a community, not as sellers and buyers; the activities are as varied as the actors, and the vibe is amiably anarchic
10. Lyrics having to do with not just resisting the dominant paradigm but knowing it as well as the bullies dominating that paradigm and THEN resisting to their faces; powerful message even as the tune is, again, a lilting Mediterranean folk song
11. A snappy ditty about a man who walks into a gallery and decapitates an 8’ marble statue of M. Thatcher, dedicating the act to his son, Alfie, whom he would like to grow up in a world quite the opposite of the one envisioned by Thatcher
12. Who’d have thunk to connect Molotov (the target, not the inventor of the cocktail), a Russian functionary who engineered the “friendly” Russian invasion of Finland by Russia and Linus Torvalds, the Finn who took on the “friendly” invasion of PCs by Microsoft Windows; two rebellious Finnish acts