If I'm in the habit of writing bollocks, what follows may be worse than usual on the grounds that Tower Block excavates and rerecords more or less an entire Go-Kart Mozart album with knobs on, namely Tearing Up the Album Charts from 2005 which, naturally, I somehow never picked up and haven't heard. Our boy felt that said album somewhat slipped under the radar and was thus deprived its due, which is obviously true in my case; so here we are again for the very first time.
Where Go-Kart Mozart was designed as a portastudio band - which makes perfect sense when you listen to the music - the Estate has a bigger budget with production values closer to Denim; so I guess the Estate is an automotive expansion rather than a feature of urban planning. You probably know what to expect here, which is what you get, and yet it's still weird and disconcerting because why would you do this?
Renovating the past for the sake of the future, is the answer given on the cover, which sort of makes sense. Tower Block in a Jam Jar isn't some beardy return to the rich songwriting traditions of Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, or Scott Walker so much as an unreconstructed defense of Micky Most and whoever wrote the lyrics to The Humphreys Are About for the Unigate television advert. It's nostalgia for all the stuff you've been trying to forget, and a reminder that while those who weren't there have come to view the seventies as David Bowie and Marc Bolan giggling as they apply glitter to each other's faces, it was mostly Barry Blue, Watney's Red Barrel, and getting your head kicked in on a Saturday night. It's nothing to do with current notions of cool. It's brown and orange with rounded corners because Chicory Tip existed whether you like it or not, which is kind of refreshing. Mozart Estate embrace and celebrate the grim, and I mean the showbiz smile so false that it hurts grim rather than the artistically grim, as most vividly embodied in the cheerfully harrowing A Lorra Laughs with Cilla. This album is weird, beautiful and horrible all at the same time, and is the opposite of everything the machine has been selling you for the past four decades.
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