Buzzin Electronic Music

Junior Boys – Begone Dull Care – album review

Junior Boys: Begone Dull Care

Junior Boys’ last record So This Is Goodbye was a brilliant piece of spacey electronica. Coming at the same sort of time as Hot Chip’s The Warning, it often got lumped into the same group as this English band, but Junior Boys were nothing like as ironic; nor were their influences so popular. On Begone Dull Care, whilst still an electronic album, Junior Boys show even more just how much they take instead from the r&b world.

The tunes, first of all, on tracks like the opener ‘Parallel Lines’ and more obviously the single ‘Hazel’, are very much taken from this scene. Greenspan – one half of the Junior Boys duo – is like a distant, incredibly earnest (on tracks like ‘Work’ he accuses an imaginary subject with the stern “You’re too eager to stall / a bit too sure of it all”) early 90s funk and soul singer, and his treble takes the sort of tunes you’d expect from these songs and delivers them like they were repetitive samples in his and Didemus’ mix.

It is not just in the lyrics and vocals that these influences come through, though. The clean production and the basic, steady drum beats recall those funk records too, and as for the blips – if they were keyboards and guitars then Begone Dull Care would be precisely that funk record only one that had got stuck. The opening to the brilliant ‘Sneak A Picture’ in particular is so like this that it sounds almost like a pastiche – there are even a few funk guitar chords and a sax at the end.

This, however, is not to take away from other aspects on Begone Dull Care. ‘Bits And Pieces’ sounds a lot like the poppier So This Is Goodbye with its tuneful synths and ‘Dull To Pause’ is an interesting piece of laid-back melancholic pop over an synthetic background.

Whilst the album is less cohesive than So This Is Goodbye, and there is not the same persistently high level of catchy songs, there are still several highlights and it is interesting that at certain points on the album, Junior Boys seem grow a lot more into their skin tocome out from behind that distant vocal and opaque veneer of electronics.

The best moments are when Junior Boys are at their most fidgety and dancy – ‘Parallel Lines’, ‘Work’, and ‘Hazel’ are surprisingly the most lively points on the album, and it is then that we see the brilliance of Junior Boys that we were persuaded of by So This Is Goodbye.

The few UK tour dates Junior Boys have planned in early June are here on their MySpace.