Echobelly : Releases >>
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People Are Expensive >>
Echobelly's fourth album, People Are Expensive (their first without core member Debbie Smith and the safety net of major label backing), sees the group finally rectifying the contrast between Sonya Aurora Maden's voice and her band's songs. Echobelly paint in far broader sweeps of emotion now, and this lustrous lusciousness works far better with Sonya's voice--a soothing caress, its emotional timbre worked uneasily on brash early numbers such as the Morrissey-esque "I Can't Imagine the World Without Me" and "Great Things". The elegiac "Dying" and mournful "Ondine", the laidback "Fear of Flying" and mantra-like "Kali Yuga" all deal in generals, not specifics, and the result is a far more coherent, mature version of Echobelly on their fourth, rather pleasing, album. --Jerry Thackray
Best Of: I Cant Imagine The Wo >>
I Can't Imagine the World Without Me is Echobelly's "best of". Although they emerged in the slipstream of the Britpop movement in the early to mid-90s and specialised in a very English brand of indie power pop, they were a genuinely multi-national/multicultural outfit. Guitarist Glen Johansson was Swedish, lead guitarist Debbie Smith was black and lead vocalist Sonya Aurora-Madan was Anglo-Asian. This, in some ways, was the point. Madan sported a Union Jack tee shirt with the slogan "My Country Too"; by placing herself squarely in the Britpop mainstream, she was claiming this as her music too. In a further irony, Echobelly were championed by that most British and provocatively Union-Jack-brandishing of artists Morrissey, who recognised the debt owed to the Smiths in tracks like "Bellyache" and "Insomniac". However, Madan never made a secret of her own race and gender politics, most obviously on "Give Her a Gun" and "Today, Tomorrow, Sometime Never", an allusion to the suffragette struggle. Most important, however, was Echobelly¹s exuberant, kinetic sense of left-field pop, best in evidence on "Great Things" and especially "I Can't Imagine The World Without Me", a wry study in rampant egomania and a three-minute, smash 'n' grab Britpop classic. --David Stubbs
Best of Echobelly: I Can't Imagine World Without Me >>
I Can't Imagine the World Without Me is Echobelly's "best of". Although they emerged in the slipstream of the Britpop movement in the early to mid-90s and specialised in a very English brand of indie power pop, they were a genuinely multi-national/multicultural outfit. Guitarist Glen Johansson was Swedish, lead guitarist Debbie Smith was black and lead vocalist Sonya Aurora-Madan was Anglo-Asian. This, in some ways, was the point. Madan sported a Union Jack tee shirt with the slogan "My Country Too"; by placing herself squarely in the Britpop mainstream, she was claiming this as her music too. In a further irony, Echobelly were championed by that most British and provocatively Union-Jack-brandishing of artists Morrissey, who recognised the debt owed to the Smiths in tracks like "Bellyache" and "Insomniac". However, Madan never made a secret of her own race and gender politics, most obviously on "Give Her a Gun" and "Today, Tomorrow, Sometime Never", an allusion to the suffragette struggle. Most important, however, was Echobelly¹s exuberant, kinetic sense of left-field pop, best in evidence on "Great Things" and especially "I Can't Imagine The World Without Me", a wry study in rampant egomania and a three-minute, smash 'n' grab Britpop classic. --David Stubbs
Tell Me Why >>
Gravity Pulls >>
The Best of Echobelly >>
Everybody's Got One >>
Lustra >>
On >>
Lustra >>
