Album number four from Californian quartet The Skygreen Leopards visits little ground the band and their inclusive folky sound haven't already happily trodden numerous times previously. But there is a touch more polish to the production and a soupcon extra Sixties homage (though they're no Beechwood Sparks).
Right from the off this disc, which originally came out in 2007, certainly bites and it's debatable whether the record label want it reviewed at all as the review file has no artist names associated with the tunes and they're simply arranged in alphabetical order. Maybe, though, the contents will inspire me to hunt down the relevant details ...
In a nutshell this is a collection of 19 instrumental tracks from the Music De Wolfe archive - the sort of album that pretty much peaked about ten years ago when many (including myself) were swept away in a frenzy of buying incidental music from Blake's 7 and Hawaiian tunes of dubious vintage to play at cocktail parties we never got around to arranging. Discs which are largely gathering dust now if not already on eBay fetching 50p. There are some gems in this particular archive's collection though, including the incidental music for Romero's Dawn Of The Dead, so potentially this sampler could be a cheaply priced gateway to great discoveries.
Jazz-funk sums up the greater part of the tunes showcased herein. Exceptions to this are the aptly titled 'Hair Raiser', with it's thunderous drum break and 'Hammerhead' which sounds like a leftover from one of the early Bond films, for the most part. Dawn Of The Dead gets a look in with the track 'Motive 1' and the only other cut that I recognised as having any pedigree is the instrumental version of 'Street Girl' by The Pretty Things in their The Electric Banana guise (the full album by whom, Blows Your Mind, is a very worthwhile purchase), albeit it's inferior to the sung version.
Having enjoyed the overall feel of the disc enough to check out the artists as listed on amazon (from where you can apparently download the package for £4.99) I can reveal there are contributions from Ludovic Decosne & Perre Daubresse, Peter Reno (a collaborator on that Electric Banana album), Reg Tilsey and Johhny Hawksworth to name but a few and I've been inspired to number the tracks in their folder to achieve the listening experience intended by the compiler(s). Could be it's time to dust off those other loungecore releases to ease ourselves into winter...
