(album, Damnably)
The legendary Osaka trio’s 15th studio album finds Shonen Knife refining their Ramonic poppery to a fine point across a disc that also showcases their expanding range and assured structuring.
Always best when they’re giving a song the full fuzzed-up day-glo treatment, Free Time features a trio of tracks that clearly demonstrate why the band have remained cult superstars for so long: Angular opener, ‘Perfect Freedom’ shows the band’s mastery of mixing garage and punk tropes into a searing broth of melodically distorted power, while ‘Economic Crisis’ is a visceral hook-ridden sugar rush that detonates tuneful fuzz bombs amid sherbet flares of thrash and rhythm. Perhaps best of all is the primary coloured sci-fi romp of ‘Monster Jellyfish’ – an irresistible drum salvo driven depth-charge that’ll have you singing its ‘Outbreak’ chorus in the tub.
The less serrated side of Shonen Knife is represented by bittersweet confections such as ‘Rock’n’Roll Cake’, and the bubblegum fluff of ‘Do You Happen To Know’ – two songs that encompass two poles of Naoko Yamono’s vocal range; from the plaintive former, through to the Fay Fife power piping of the latter. There’s strange and wondrous fare on offer, too – ‘Capybara’ is an appropriately semi-aquatic upbeat shuffle that for some reason calls to mind Blondie’s ‘Tide Is High’, ‘An Old Stationary Shop’ evokes past times and sounds a lot like Peter, Paul and Mary have been given a new wave makeover, while ‘Pick Your Own’ (an agricultural, berry-fixated chant-a-long) is at times reminiscent of a punked up ‘Smurf Song’.
Penultimate track ‘Love Song’ finds the trio mining a classic seam of girl groupery, all ankle socks and angst, whereas the closing ‘Star’ is an effects assaulted aspirational hymn with a cosmic sonic subtext that wraps around a guitar break, which, oddly, goes a bit Frampton in places. Such strangeness is part of Shonen Knife’s considerable charm, and across this album there’s an artful simplicity that – as with the Ramones – is indicative of a group of a group that is smart enough to keep things simple.
