Booty and the beast (From Dorset Echo)

Booty and the beast

6:43am Friday 12th December 2008 in

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BEYONCÉ
I Am... Sasha Fierce (MusicWorld/Columbia)
THE BRONX
The Bronx (III) (Wichita)
HER SPACE HOLIDAY
Xoxo Panda And The New Kid Revival (Wichita)

PROOF, if any were needed, of the colossal heft which Beyoncé Knowles enjoys in career terms was amply provided when she opted to call her last album B’Day; and no one was brave enough to stand up and say “Beyoncé, honey, you can’t call your album Bidet.”

Now there’s this, I Am... Sasha Fierce, a double album which purports to present to the world both the ‘real’ Beyoncé Knowles, naked as a wee lamb, and the ‘working’ version – Sasha Fierce – sassy, airbrushed (nay, sandblasted), antsy and wearing on the album sleeve what looks like an antique breastplate fashioned from a Louis XIV carriage clock.

One’s alarm bells start clanging like dropped scaffolding poles whenever an artiste opts to adopt a pseudonym for an aspect of their personality. It can’t help but imply a towering degree of vanity and a certain amount of careful, evasive dissembling.

You know the kind of thing: let’s just imagine you were to catch me in a club one night standing on a table whirling my underpants around my head and drinking meths out of a lap dancer’s surgical boot. If I were to say “no no, that wasn’t me, that was Sasha” you would give me the mother of all Old-Fashioned Looks; and you would be well within your rights to do so.

Artistes, however, occupy an exalted realm wherein this sort of malarkey is tolerated to a degree and positively encouraged in certain quarters for PR purposes, so long as it helps to shift units.

The obverse of this – the whole ‘take me as I really am’ approach – is also a potentially calamitous minefield, conjuring forth dread images of ‘Jenny From The Block’-style lack of self-awareness; or for older readers, the bit at the end of Mike Yarwood’s show where he would yell “and this is me!”

After that lengthy cogitation, it may surprise you to learn that I Am... Sasha Fierce is really a rather good album of its kind, in the main. The Sasha Fierce side is hard going, admittedly – brittle, businesslike, bling-bedecked modern R&B, a monolith of hard, shiny surfaces – but the I Am side is an altogether warmer, poppier affair. If I Were A Boy is her most thoughtful and thought-provoking offering to date; a philosophical, affecting plea for menfolk to be a little more thoughtful, empathetic and accountable than they tend to be while they’re strutting around doing all that boy stuff... weeing in bottles and suchlike.

Speaking of boys, here they come in the bunched-up, pugilistic shape of The Bronx, an LA quintet who conjure forth welcome echoes of the MC5, At The Drive-In and Foo Fighters on their third album, not unreasonably entitled III.

Leaving aside for a moment the puzzling conundrum of a band calling themselves The Bronx when they are based on the opposite coast, what you get is a marvellous maelstrom of punk rock forward thrust topped with urgent, edge-of-his-range vocals from Matt Caughthran.

Where the MC5 or At The Drive-In occasionally betrayed avant-garde experimental tendencies, The Bronx stay on task throughout. One could therefore accuse them of being a bit samey, but then that would be to deny oneself the cumulative pleasure of being hammered by all 11 tracks in a row, which is a bit like standing in the path of a wrecking ball.

Finally, XoXo Panda And The New Kid Revival by Her Space Holiday reveals a certain affinity with the skiffle-via-Velvet Underground approach currently favoured by Herman Dune and pioneered, of course, by Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers back in 1977.

To all intents and purposes the work of Californian hardcore scene alumnus Marc Bianchi, Her Space Holiday is a project which has been slowly fermenting and mutating since 1997 or thereabouts. This latest manifestation, all lo-fi tinkling and sandbox percussion, boasts heaps of ramshackle charm – heard to best effect on The Year In Review, No More Good Ideas, Sleepy Tigers and Two Tin Cans And A Length Of String.