Poppy appeal (Jollification - Lightning Seeds)

Member Name: davidbuttery

Product:	Jollification - Lightning Seeds
Date:	06/11/09 (37 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The summer we didn't have is right here

Disadvantages: Only ten tracks

The Lightning Seeds never really got the commercial recognition they deserved. Yes, their two versions of "Three Lions" in collaboration with the even then rather tiresome Baddiel and Skinner made number one, but that and their "Like You Do..." compilation album apart they managed only one sally into the top ten in either chart. Even that was for a song - "You Showed Me" - that had been written three decades earlier and whose 1990s fame was due simply to its inclusion on the Austin Powers soundtrack.

This is rather a shame, because in the field of what might be called "summer pop" - melodies like an afternoon sea breeze and shimmering harmonies backed up with at times deceptively rocky beats - the Lightning Seeds take some beating. Jollification has a good claim to be the best record they ever released, and indeed one of the finest pop albums of the decade, despite its disappointing shortness at just ten tracks and barely forty minutes of music. Astoundingly, it took over a year, and the relative success of the single of "Change" for it even to break the top 40, and though it sold over half a million copies in the end, the great British public seemed still to prefer the likes of Robson and Jerome. Their loss.

The cover design is just a little disturbing, showing as it does a giant strawberry suspended in mid-air with faces gazing out from where the seeds should be. Oh, and a few other strawberries, of various bright colours, floating around it. I really have no idea at all what it is supposed to signify: oh, I could make up something vaguely plausible, such as that the sky represents the light touch of the music, the fruit represents summer and the faces represent... um... faces, but - well, you see my point. It's all very psychedelic, though as not overtly druggy as some of the Beatles' later output. (What is?)

Despite there only being ten songs on Jollification, the hit rate is outstanding. Not a single one of the songs is a genuine clunker, and the great majority are truly excellent. We get off to an excellent start with "Perfect", wherein Ian Broudie (whose vocals remind me somewhat of the Pet Shop Boys) sings of perfection with such insistence that you know it can't be true. The imagery in this song is particularly effective: who'd have thought that a tower-block window-box could be made so poetic? "In towers high with time to fill / Gardens on your window sill / In between the pavement and the sky" is simple yet wonderfully evocative.

It goes on like this, from the swirling, misty-morning opening to Lucky You right through to the and it's quite hard to pick out favourites simply because there's so much to like here. Feeling Lazy, for example, is a dead-on slice of suburban life, Change is just plain exuberant, while My Best Day is a real belter and enjoys a tremendous contribution from one Alison Moyet. Even Marvellous, on which your attention can begin to wander during the overly long intro, dispels such feelings within a few seconds as the ebullient second half of the song explodes into life, while time has washed away any awkwardly corporate memories of its use in a ubiquitous Ford advertising campaign.

Despite the "summer pop" designation I gave Jollification at the start of this review, just occasionally the Seeds slip in something a little darker. The best example of this is the penultimate track, Punch And Judy (no, not the Marillion song!). "Baby's eyes are black" it begins, and before long we're hearing that "yes turned into no" and feeling an awful lot more uncomfortable than we thought we would during a Lightning Seeds album. I have mixed feelings about the short instrumental section about two minutes in, though: the slightly discordant sound is obviously deliberate, but I'm not sure it works; the wait before the vocals restart may even be too short.

Although Why Why Why does suffer a little from a too-insistent drum track, the weakest part of the album - though "weak" here is a relative term - is to be found, rather unfortunately, at the very end. The last song, Telling Tales, keeps up the high standard we've become used to until about two minutes in, with its swirling, magical sound somewhat redolent of that half-imaginary land we inhabit between sleep and wakefulness. The final third of the track, though, is a rather unimaginative, gradually fading instrumental which is hard to take seriously because of the presence of what sounds awfully like a didgeridoo. Rolf Harris, eat your heart out.

That really is a minor disappointment, however, and as a whole Jollification is a triumph. Okay, so it's not very long, but if you put the average top-ten pop album and this side by side and cut out only the indifferent or worse sections on each, there is no doubt which record would hold on to a larger percentage of its original content. The Lightning Seeds at their peak were one of the finest pop bands of recent years - and this *is* the band at their peak. Thoroughly recommended.

Track listing:

1. Perfect
2. Lucky You
3. Open Goals
4. Change
5. Why Why Why
6. Marvellous
7. Feeling Lazy
8. My Best Day
9. Punch & Judy
10. Telling Tales

Jollification is available from Amazon at the time of writing for a mere £4.98, which frankly is an unmissable bargain. You can download individual MP3s from the same site for 69p each, but really, why would you want to? The tracks are also all available on Spotify.

Summary: Broudie's a jolly good fellow