Editorial Reviews Music Review:
Music Review
Ballets of the French Impressionists
Music: Live Psalm 69 Tour [Live]
Best 1200 [Import] [Limited Edition]
Antonio Carlos Jobim's Finest Hour
Beethoven: Piano Concerto, No.5/Symphony No.1
Amazon.com
The band whose alumni went on to both the Beautiful South and (improbably) Fatboy Slim was a lot more like the former. Paul Heaton's laconic songs are nicely groomed and innocuous-sounding, with a happy jangle and rich harmonies (the group's interest in gospel extends to technique as well as sentiment), but there is a dryly vicious sense of humor lurking inside them--"Sheep" flips a familiar religious image on its back and leaves its legs waving in the air. London 0 Hull 4, the band's first album, is full of cheerful, taut little tunes about failures of the spirit, barstool sexism, and thermonuclear Armageddon--not to mention love of humanity, which underscored the fact that they weren't just nihilists, they actually cared. --Douglas Wolk