It's hard to imagine that CHUMBAWAMBA have been kicking and screaming against all and sundry for over 20 years now, but in their continuing quest to merge pop and politics, there's always a conscious attempt to continually update their sound, ensuring that - from a listener's point of view - it's essential to expect the unexpected when each new Chumbas album rolls around.
The band's previous studio album "Readymades" was a case in point. As well as launching Chumbawamba's own Mutt label, it proffered a set of songs rich in the folk tradition, sampling the likes of Norma Waterson and Dick Gaughan and blending them in with breakbeats, house-y pianos and smooth, keyboard-based soundscapes. The lyrical bite was present and correct as ever, and the album was a quiet triumph, but still a million miles from the brash "Tubthumping" era a mere five years before.
"Un," though, will be a postive boon for anyone who loved the engagingly catchy, surprisingly commercial pop sound
Chumbawamba forged circa 1994's "Anarchy". Naturally, it's nothing like a facsimile of that record, but the pithy, catchy choruses, timely lyrical invective and bright pop sensurround are all back in the studio. Alice Nutter recently told me the band wanted to make an album they could really get stuck into live (unlike "Readymades" which was much more studio-bound) and with "Un" - that's "Un", not "U.N" as in Kofi Annan and Hans Blix, by the way - they've achieved that goal. This will be a riot live.
The patented English pop Chumbawamba sound has been expanded though, and "Un" is a much more global-sounding sonic effort. Delicious opener "The Wizard Of Menlo Park" revels in the origins of sampling, advances in sound with references to Thomas Edison and ex-Bowie/Elton John producer Gus Dudgeon, the man who stuck the very first sampled loop together back in 1971 and features a distinctly African sample-based motif.
Elsewhere, songs like "Just Desserts" and "Everything You Know Is Wrong" are vintage Chumbwamba. In "Just Desserts", the band's heavenly harmonies are at the forefront, while humour tempers the political lyrical invective and Bill Gates gets a custard pie in the mush ("Never trust a man with egg on his face", they sing astutely), while "Everything You Know Is Wrong" attacks the shadowy chracacters who re-write history behind our backs ("I lean on people in the loop to help them unremember") and could either be a well-observed update of "Bigmouth Strikes Again" or the Chumbas very own "Sympathy For The Devil." Lyrically anyway.
Intriguingly, several of the album's best moments employ a very hot-blooded Latin-American feel, though bearing in mind the subject matter that's probably no surprise. "When Fine Society Sits Down To Dine" for instance, has Flamenco-style guitar from Boff, fruity organ, saucy horn motifs and sensual violin from guest Gill Pearson and is based on the work of Bolivian women's movement Mujeros Creando, who - through art as well as activism - have actually made a real difference in their country. "We Don't Want To Sing Along," also adopts a Latin American lope, and while the song loosely relates to the Columbine High School massacre, the message is a more global anti-bully/ pro-thinking one.
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Typically, though, "Un" is a typically effective melange of styles and the Chumbas don't deny their Englishness either. Respected folk accordion player Andy Cutting is almost omnipresent, while songs like the social centre-promoting "Following You" and the lilting "I Did It For Alfie" are pure pop with a twist. Hell, the latter - about the guy who decapitated the Margaret Thatcher statue - even finds Jew's Harp and drifting harmonica (from New Model Army's Justin Sullivan) coming into play.
Arguably, "Un"s best song is its' most topical and controversial one, however. "On eBay" is a shockingly effective commentary on the American-sanctioned destruction of Iraqi culture in the wake of last year's war. The embattled Donald Rumsfeld is under further unfriendly fire, and in one of the best examples of velvet 'glove/ iron fist' ever - and against a sublime folk and reggae-tinged backdrop with "Play"-style blues samples - the Chumbas get to work. "In old Baghdad they're dusting off antiques, it's the fourteenth 'Guernica' we've had this week" they sing as Mr.Rumsfeld insists that "Television is merely running the same footage of the same man stealing a vase over and over." as Iraq's greatest museum is irretrievably pillaged. Yeah, right, nice one Don. In a democratic world it might even be a hit single.
Justice - and just desserts - aside, though, what can't be denied is that "Un" is Chumbawamba's best and most consistent album since "Anarchy." The lyrical barbs are as incisive as ever and the band's playing, singing and arranging has brought off a fine pop coup in its' own right. Angry, vital and memorably listenable, even in their third decade Chumbawamba prove that self-confessed anarchists are neither dull and grey or incapable of getting you up and frugging uncontrollably.
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