Bill Wells & Shalal Hash Baz - Osaka Bridge [Karaoke Kalk - 2006]Osaka Bridge is a pleasing haphazard take on Jazz, mixing in soundtrack and vocal elements. To create an album that awkwardly drifts past the ears. It seems to murmur of lost images of the seventies and sixties, all teethy smiles and too bright soft drinks. Duck has the air of Sesame Street or an USA soap opera, with slow monition footage of a couple running through a summer’s field, the tune barely staying together. Proxy feels like slowed down show music, like watching a chorus line of bawdry females, amble on to a poorly lit stage to play out a badly rehearsed dance routine. Time makes me so black, marries orientaly sweet singing with rolling piano cords, offering up a strangely touching and Smokey ballad, that you can imaging listening to in a deserted bar as the early mornings hours slip by. Banned Announcements cant help, but make you smile, with it’s off centre sunshiny demeanour, that's threatening to full apart at any minute, like it’s just been held together by day-glow plasters. An oddly heart warming and truly shambolic album, that sucks you in with its skewed beauty and happy-go-lucky charms. That I’m sure will bring back hazy childhood memories of the seventies, for those of us that grew up in that decade. Roger Batty
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