Pros: With this much diversity, everyone can enjoy songs from this album.
Cons: With this much diversity, everyone will find a few songs not to like.
The Bottom Line: There really is something for everyone on this album. If your music tastes run very narrow, you might be disappointed, but if you appreciate diversity you'll be pleased.
DrFaustus's Full Review: Handcream For a Generation by Cornershop
70's-style guitar rock. Late 90's indie-pop. Experimental jazz. Trance. Electronica. Reggae. Smooth easy listening. Extended Indian-influenced jam sessions. Soul. Funk.
You could probably find examples of all of the above if you went to a large, independently owned record store. You could spend an afternoon browsing through rack after rack, hoping to find a little bit of everything that may or may not mix well together. Or, you could save yourself a lot of time and effort and just pick up Cornershop's recent album Handcream for a Generation.
I don't quite know where to begin to classify Handcream for a Generation. The album covers so many bases that no single description can do it justice. Far to many artists these days find a single formula that works well (or have a formula thrust upon them by some label exec who has mastered the business of music, but can't quite understand the artistic side) and rehash that formula over and over again on an album. Sure, many of these formula albums turn out successfully, since whatever formula has been chosen is one that has worked for someone else in the recent past, but you can't help feeling cheated when you listen to one of these albums. It's almost like you paid full album price to hear one song over and over again. (I could name names at this point, but I might end up mentioning some albums that I've been enjoying a lot lately. I think everyone can think of his or her own examples, though, so I'll just stay quiet on the matter.)
Handcream for a Generation, on the other hand, is truly the musical equivalent of the sample platter of appetizers you can find at your local family restaurant. You get a little bit of everything, and nothing really dominates. It offers a well-balanced mixture, and I can honestly say that no two songs on the album sound alike. This is clearly a huge risk, both musically and creatively, but we need to pause and genuflect before Cornershop's creative founder, Tjinder Singh (no, that's not a typo), for having the guts to take such a big risk in today's music world.
Since there are no constants on the album, I can't write much about the music in general terms. Instead, I'll just look at some of the tracks individually and say what I can.
The album opens with Heavy Soup, which isn't so much a song, but rather an introduction to the rest of the album. This track offers a strong background of soul/funk horns with a strong beat that plays under a spoken monologue from soul master Otis Clay. Clay acts like the MC at a nightclub, giving a brief introduction to all of the tracks coming up on the album. Like I said, it's hard to classify Heavy Soup as an actual song. But it still has a strong enough beat for you to get your grove on.
Track two sees Cornershop morph into a reflection of modern indie-pop groups like Semisonic. The song, Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform, is bouncy and upbeat, with strong guitar hooks, peppy xylophone backing, and a catchy chorus sung by schoolchildren. Of all the songs on the album, Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform is the most likely to become a radio hit, and has, in fact, been receiving a fair amount of airplay on Public Radio's excellent World Café show.
Before the album can settle into a predictable patter, the music makes a huge shift with the next track, Music Plus 1, an electronica type dance number. Serious dance club music like this has never really been my cup of tea, though. Knowing my limitations, I'll just kind gloss over this one and move on.
The next track, Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III, pulls the sound of the album back into my realm (and I has one of the coolest titles I've ever seen for a song). If I didn't know better, I'd think that this song was an obscure track taken from a mid 70's Rolling Stones album. The song opens with the kind of blazing guitar chords that Keith Richards has been mining for decades. The backing vocals sound like they could have come straight from Honky Tonk Women. The lead vocals are the only part of the song that doesn't remind me of the Stones, but it's not much of a stretch to picture Mick strutting around and singing a cover of this one. A fantastic track overall.
From here, the album continues is genre-bending streak with a mix of hip hop and Booker T style soul in Wogs Will Walk, reggae in Motion the Eleven, and guitar funk in People Power. The next two tracks take the album through a more experimental turn. Sounds Super Recordings offers a spoken monologue in what I can only assume to be Punjabi over a jazzy drum beat, much like some of the music from US3. The London Radar claims to recreate the experience of a British Airways flight through music. The voice of the captain tells us at the start of the song that "you won't find all that you do hear easy." I'd have to agree, as the track is a bit too experimental for my tastes, but the lounge style groves beneath the spoken bits aren't bad.
After these songs, Spectral Mornings offers the albums most ambitious music. The song is a sprawling fourteen-minute epic that combines elements of traditional Indian music and instrumentation with a strong rush of rock guitars. The track features some heavy handed but powerful guitar work from Noel Gallagher of Oasis (for those keeping score at home, he's the surly one). The result of all of this is what you might expect if Jimi Hendrix and George Harrison had collaborated on an album three decades ago. Fourteen minutes is, in my opinion, just a wee bit to long for this one, but it still makes for some good listening.
Finally, the album winds down to a close with Slip the Drummer One, a rather uninspired track of distorted lyrics that does little more than give the listener a chance to unwind after the sprawling track the proceeds it, Heavy Soup (Outro), an instrumental reprise of the album's opener that helps tie everything together, and an adult contemporary, Al-Green-sounding Bonus Track. Whether that last track is meant as an actual bonus track, or whether the title is meant as some tongue-in-cheek joke is up for debate, but the song low key atmosphere helps put things to rest after the heavy musical journey that the album has been through.
As you can probably tell from my descriptions, Handcream for a Generation is all over the map, musically speaking. Nothing this diverse should have any sense of cohesiveness. And yet, the album does work as a unified whole, somehow. Words, phrases, and even whole lines pop up in multiple songs, reminding the listener of previous tracks. That, and the opening track that served to introduce the album's "lineup" work to create a unified feel for such a diverse album.
In an album this diverse, it's impossible not to find a song or two that you can fall in love with, no matter what your tastes are. But of the flip side of the diversity coin, you're also going to find a few tracks to be a bit grating. As long as you're willing to accept that you'll probably use the fast forward button on your CD player a few times while you listen to this one, Handcream for a Generation will make a fine addition to the collection of anyone who loves musical diversity.
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