barney and me...

I came to the Boo Radleys pretty late. A couple of very favourable reviews of Giant Steps made me go out and buy it, I was intrigued by one reviewer's opinion at the time that it was one of the most ambitious records of the year. I'd read enough about them in music rags to know that they kind of fitted in with the shoegazing stuff that I was listening to around that time, so I bought the album without actually previously hearing anything by them.
(sidenote: Do you remember those days? A time when you couldn't just surf to MySpace and listen to a couple of tracks, or watch the band's latest video on YouTube? You would go and buy an album on the strength of a glowing review in Select magazine, a Melody Maker front page colour photo, a brief snippet of a video on The Chart Show or on hearing the end of a track on John Peel? Nine times out of ten you'd be gutted by the utter shiteness of what you'd bought - yes, Thousand Yard Stare; I'm looking in your direction - occasionally you would discover an absolute gem).
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Giant Steps clicked with me on first listen. I understood what the reviewer meant by it being an ambitious record - there were My Bloody Valentine wall of sound guitars, twee indie-jangle moments, Beach Boys harmonies (long before plastering Beach Boys backing vocals over your track was fashionable), wind and horn sections, Burt Bacharach chords, there was even a Casio VL Tone on one track - the guys in this band were obviously trying to do something new, it seemed like they wanted to push their indie/alternative leanings into a new place. It was an album that was on heavy rotation on my CD player for many months after purchase and became one of the "classic" albums in my collection. Such was my enamourment of their stuff that I started buying their singles, their subsequent releases and also delved into the back catalogue.
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Once it was announced they had split, after the rather subdued Kingsize album, my interest dropped off sharply. I didn't listen to them for a good few years, it wasn't until I stumbled across a mention of head Boo Martin Carr's "BraveCaptain" solo project on a blog that I remembered how much I loved their music and dug out their discs for a retrospectacular trip down musical memory lane.
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What a mistake-a to make.
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Listening to Giant Steps now is like looking at an old photograph of yourself from donkey's years ago. You remember when the photo was taken, you thought you looked cool and trendy in those fashionable clothes, how smart that new sofa was and how cutting edge the design on the wallpaper looked; but in reality you look hideously out of date, the decor is shockingly anachronistic and it dawns on you that times have changed and things have moved on in a drastic fashion. Where it once sounded futuristic, forward-looking and in places almost epic in its sweep, Giant Steps now sounds try-too-hard, shambolic and amateurish. The harmony vocals are stumblingly inept, the bass meanders woefully, the guitars sound almost-but-not-quite out of tune, keyboards sound like they're playing a different song to the one in which they feature, the arrangements of horn and woodwind sound really, really hamfisted and the production is kind of tinny.
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Listening to their previous album "Everything's Alright Forever", it's clear that the Boo Radleys weren't a crap band. They sound more than confident and seem comfortable in the wall-of-feedback and distorted guitar thrashing of that album, perhaps the ambitious reach of Giant Steps was pushing them too far, too quickly.
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Having said all that, it's not a terrible album by any stretch of the imagination and it's one I'm glad to have in my collection. Even if it is a bit crap in places. At least it was striving for true greatness, unlike the output of Oasis, Cast or any of those other ploddingly shite indie bands from the same period who seemed happy to just re-hash what they'd done previously.