REVIEW: Delakota, One Love (Go! Beat Import)
- Tim Mohr
Thank god this decade looks to be finishing up like the previous one: with complete lunatics from bleak British towns putting together joyously unfettered music assembled from various bits and pieces of current musical style. If the Happy Mondays and Primal Scream managed to close the book on the 80s with Pills'n'Thrills'n'Bellyaches and Screamadelica , Delakota may well have produced the first such (last) record of the 90s with One Love .
Then again, perhaps One Love is in fact the missing member of a trinity of albums that should have launched the 90s, as Delakota sound rather like the Stone Roses at the apex of their career (i.e. "I Am The Resurrection" and the two post-album singles, including "Fool's Gold"). Delakota even managed to name their album after the last real Stone Roses' single, too, assuming the post-Led Zeppelin nightmare that emerged after the post-"One Love" hiatus was something other than the real Stone Roses.
Delakota have essentially made the record that we all wanted Second Coming to be. Since John Squire's tragic (and apparently permanent) loss of all semblance of taste is the easiest diagnosis of the demise of Second Coming (and indeed the real Stone Roses), it is perhaps clever that Delakota made One Love without a proper guitar player--or band for that matter.
Delakota are two guys, a bunch of gear, and some computers. Typically a song is constructed from a home-made guitar loop, a drum sequencer, and a voice like Ian Brown's. The pipes belong in fact to a Browne named Cass, formerly drummer with the Senseless Things, a truly excrable guitar outfit who managed to reach the unenviable "peak" of touring Germany as opener for the New Model Army--just as Britpop was taking shape. But that is just a chuckle-inducing footnote now, for Delakota are among the leaders of the next school of British indie, the one that includes Cornershop, Space, and a rejuvenated Primal Scream, the one that promises to make the next few years as exciting as the Madchester era a decade ago, the one that once again remembers that this thing called rock was invented for dancing.
