Cornershop - When I Was Born for the 7th Time (1997)

 

I've tried with this one, but I've tried by means of a Discman while out riding the range on my horse. Now listening to the thing at home, I realise it benefits somewhat from being played over speakers like background music. This is annoying because I'd already built up a significant head of ambivalence and had worked out what I wanted to write; but fuck it, I'll just say what I was going to say and you can assume that it's probably better.

I first heard of this lot back when Morrissey recorded that album of Skrewdriver covers or whatever it was that he did, and Cornershop wrote him a letter to explain how disappointed they were - much to the delight of the music press. It was something along those lines anyway. If the sentiment was worthy, I remained unimpressed on the grounds that Morrissey had spent his entire career eulogising the good old sixties, Granny Grove on black and white telly, penny chews, and how everything used to be much better than it was in the nineties. He'd never struck me as an ambassador for multicultural Britain, and it seemed bizarre that anyone should be surprised after Bengali in Platforms.

Anyway, I saw Cornershop live at least once, possibly twice, but don't remember much about the experience. I had, and still have, a few of their first records. I dig Hold On It Hurts out roughly every five or six years to give it another chance, but beyond that Born Disco, Died Heavy Metal is fairly amusing, it still sounds like a fucking racket, and not even an interesting racket; then I encountered this for a single dollar in the usual place.

It's not terrible, and you could get a fairly respectable 10" out of this bunch by excising all the pissing about, the tracks which don't really count as songs. Sleep on the Left Side and Brimful of Asha are both reasonably wonderful as vaguely summery John Denver impersonations with maybe a bit of Velvet Underground chucked in, and there are perhaps four or five others; beyond which we have a lot of that stuff which always washed ashore every time one of the music papers published yet another krautrock retrospective - three minutes of drumming, someone pissing about with a digital delay, strum strum strum about halfway through then someone pushing an easy listening record around by hand and pretending that it's scratching. It's all very well, and God knows that could serve to describe half of the bands with which I've ever been involved; but it was long in the tooth even before I got hold of it, never mind this bunch. The best you can say of these examples is that they probably worked well as linking music for that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost sitcom, the one without any actual jokes. To me, tracks of this general type make it sound like you don't actually know what you're doing but - hey - look, we're nearly up to an hour now, the album is finished! Just because you were there doesn't mean it's interesting, and no, calling it improvisation really doesn't make any difference whatsoever.

That being said, When I Was Born for the 7th Time sounds much better on speakers, blending into the background as something not unlike elevator music; which was maybe the whole point.

If you read through the above a couple of times, I'm sure you'll eventually find something useful.