Living in a Giant Candle Winking at God
(Malicious Damage)
Promising anthems that “make dance music exciting and ambient again”, the Transit Kings sincerely want to pretend that the Noughties never happened and we are all back in the early 1990s boshing E’s and waiting for John Major to go away.
Founded by the Orb founders Alex Paterson and Dom Beken, along with the KLF mainman, Jimmy Cauty, it seems as if the Transits might still have access to the kind of drugs that lit up dance music in its heyday — to judge, at least, from their delight for Gregorian chants, Bollywood samples, swirly electronica and, on Concourse at least, a sample that asks dreamily: “What is the magic that makes one’s eyes sparkle and gleam like the sky?” They’ve enlisted an equally far-out list of collaborators: the Pink Floyd bassist, Guy Pratt; the Fast Show comic Simon Day; the former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr; and even (according to the credits) William Butler Yeats. Sadly, it all adds up to an Orb-lite, Deep Forest-style sludge. Which if you’ve never come down from the Summer of Love might not be a problem, but to anyone with a passing interest in dance, or even pop music’s progress, will seem a bit like witnessing someone waving a glo-stick while trying to bongo along to Gnarls Barkley . . . all wrong.
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PHOEBE GREENWOOD