(from CWSY#5, March '01) / home / reviews index
Fonda 500 - 'The
Autumn: Winter Collection' (The Village)
From the group who brought the stupendous 'Super Chimpanzee' out of
Hull, here is "the sound of Simon and Nick arsing around in their
bedrooms"
Albums rarely have proper introductions nowadays. Here we have a little Hull girl announcing over delicately picked guitar, "Hello, and welcome..". One might think this rather twee, but repetition creates confusion. And after a surfeit of "do-de-do"s, the harmonium -enhanced explanation "we sing the song that the autumn tree sings" sounds more twee than the Gentle Waves, but there's some Super Furry oddness which makes it almost as lovely. The children shouting "dans la caravanette"; the astronomy lesson and pitch-shifted keyboard of 'The Stars That You Can See…'; "snowball, snowball, in your face" as the first line of a love song; all add interest to the mellow lo-fi acoustics, although there's no need for strangeness to compensate for whimsy when even a line like "we are the animals, help us turn out the lights" can be sung in such heartbreaking falsetto (still I love the chorus of kazoos). Or as '…zzzz' makes you think of Blur around a campfire.
Most entertaining, however, is the moment when the 500 (or only 2/5 of them, so should that be Fonda 200?) treat us to what sounds like the killing of bumblebees with a digital watch, even "the sound of us eating biscuits" and more. It must be heard, showing that either the band's drugs have become less mellow and more maddening, or that they've over-indulged in their mid-winter feast. Perhaps we should join them.
