CD OF THE WEEK

LEMON JELLY
64-95'
XL

Eccentricity, as Lemon Jelly have proven time and time again, is nothing to be scared of. The duo's music-making began initially as a grand jape, with as much emphasis on high-end design as top-drawer melodies and chilled-to-the-bone samples. Now, however, it's morphed into a highly successful jamboree, the Jelly's last album Lost Horizons taking over from Portishead and Massive Attack on the suburban dinner-party soundtrack circuit. While the song doesn't remain the same for '64-'95, the sound certainly has not changed dramatically. Each track is painstakingly crafted from the ground up, a specific sample nicked somewhere from 1964 to 1995 acting as a springboard for Nick Frangen and Fred Deakin's subsequent flights of fancy. The strangest things work: Gallagher & Lyle's I Wanna Stay With You becomes a cloudbursting, summery soft-rock anthem, while the hard-rocking Masters of Reality provide the foundations for the driving, wobbling Come Down On Me. It's all perfectly acceptable, witty and cosmically tweaked to the nth degree. Yet there is more than a hint that Lemon Jelly seem content to stay within their horizons, as there is nothing here which would not have seemed out of place on either of their previous albums. Locked into a genre, it's difficult to see where Lemon Jelly can go from here. The jokes are still funny but we're not giggling as much as before. www.lemonjelly.ky Jim Carroll