Make-Up - Save Yourself (CD)

Gospeldelica doing cartwheels

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Nov 17, 1999

With "Save Yourself", their sixth elpee, Make Up have finally managed to force open the tumescent ribs of pop and stab heroically at its heart. It continues the theme of the awesome garage slashes of (their last studio album) "In Mass Mind", in that... it's all about Ian Svenonius' irrepressible urge to procreate (with bass ace and partner Michelle Mae, or whoever, it's not clear). "C'mon Let's Spawn" is the best example, revolving around a refrain of "I wanna be a big fish in a small pond" (which The Make Up still, agonisingly, are), sweltering under the weight of its pumping groove and Fred Erskine's almost atonal trumpet playing, redolent of primetime NoU. On "Call Me Mommy", Svenonius goes all Freudian ("Didn't know that I was knocked up/'Til I took a test in a paper cup/It surprised me when it looked up and called me mommy") in frenzy of luuurve. "White Belts" fuses 80s electro funk, 60s garage guitars and James Brown grunts, whilst "The Bells" dissolves into Sonic Youth-esque guitar abuse before resurfacing as pure gospel (yeh yeh), "I Am Pentagon" asks "I'm on a parallel plane...which side you gonna be on?" beneath a tumult of acute guitar shapes. Weighing in with nine tracks and finishing in thirty-six minutes, it climaxes with a demented eight-minute destruction of "Hey Joe", with guest vocalist Heather Worley adding chiming harmonies; triumphantly reclaiming the classic as their own.This ain't the sound of future - the tunes show their influences on their (immaculately tailored) sleeves (Rev. Al Green, Sonic Youth, James Brown, Fugazi, MC5, Stooges...) - but, pertinently, they add their own sense of personality to the proceedings. It couldn%2 Read more Less