Zombie Zombie – A Land For Renegades

• 27th May 2008

Upon receiving this album for review, I took a few seconds out to take note of the psychedelic artwork that adorns the front cover of the promo copies. I promptly put the CD into my stereo, and pressed play. I then listened to the whole set of tracks, without stopping to change tracks or even to do very much else at all.

The metronomic beat of ‘Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free’ seems to run like a subterranean river throughout all eleven tracks. None of them bore: a lot of them sound like Add N to X meeting ‘Vanishing Point’-era Primal Scream in a very high tech studio. There’s little scuffing of the sound, very little distortion or playful texturing. It’s clean and forthright and studiously recorded stuff. When they try to do atmospherics though, for example, on the sinister ‘I’m Afraid of What’s There’, there’s a jovial edge to the caterwauling vocal samples and jolly ride cymbal patterns over the scenic keys backdrop.

Title track ‘A Land For Renegades’ is certainly very listenable and well-constructed but the more that I did go through the album, the lack of bends and curves worried me. Rather like a beautiful, scenic drive on a very straight road, you almost yearn for a 45 degree bend with an incline so you can test your skills. You want be led somewhere into Spiritualized-esque territory maybe, or take a detour through some of the more bpm-led parts of the Boards of Canada oeuvre.

Altogether though, this is a fine collection of instrumental tracks from a band that is adept at capturing listener interest (in the first instance). The main worry for me was the depth of the tracks in terms of repeated listens – whilst the track ‘A Land For Renegades’ for instance does have a heap of overdubs and effects and multiple instrumental lines, they are content to let the same bass riff rumble through the entire thing with no change – and it is nine minutes long. The beautiful intro to ‘What’s Happening In The City?’ is an example of the album at it’s best – simple, funky and melodic and, more to the point, you can see a vocal line actually detracting from it if not handled very well indeed. Vocal samples are inserted with random pitch bends applied at the denouement of the song and in a dark room, late at night, it’s actually more than a little disturbing.

Iggy Pop’s ‘Nightclubbing’ crops up as a cover version towards the end of the album, too – the one track that features a vocal. It fits oddly well, making the case for Zombie Zombie to get on the microphone and turn some of the meandering parts of the previous nine songs into more concise and tightly-wound missives. ‘When I Scream You Scream’, the album closer, if supplied with a vocal track, could have been a modern day successor to Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’. It’s powerful, muscular but sound tracked with comedy screams (as you might expect) instead of something that might make use of a chord sequence that Depeche Mode might have used quite readily in one of their rare, happier, major chord moments.