Choke (Choke - The Beautiful South)

Member Name: davepridd

Product:	Choke - The Beautiful South
Date:	07/07/00 (18 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some good songs, great vocals

Disadvantages: Not their best and too short

This is the Beautiful South's second album, released in 1990, and it contains the group's only no.1 single to date, 'A little time'.

I don't think that it is quite as good as the debut, which was more varied, and had less fillers on it, but this is only comparitive as everything that the Beautiful South do is of very good quality and better than most of the things going in the chart. The problem with this album is that the production is a bit thin and so the sound doesn't have as much depth to it as recent albums, sounding a bit like Belle and Sebastian in places. Maybe it was released a bit too soon after the debut album as there are only really 8 songs on it, with 'Lips' and 'Mother's pride' being too short to count and 'The rising of Grafton Street' being a fairly pointless instrumental.

However, these 8 songs are very good, having a slightly experimental edge to them, as in the debut album, but adding more brass, keyboards and vocal harmonies - and therefore setting up some of the trademark charecteristics of the Beautiful South. As you can tell from the title, this is a very witty album, but there are many more elements to it than this. Paul Heaton's lyrics are as good as ever and explore a whole range of emotions very effectively, and not resting with misery as much as in other albums. The tunes are very good although most tracks employ a C - G - F chord structure which is not very adventurous.

Summary: