FFWD Weekly
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| Music by Mike Bell Crash Test Dummies Maybe it’s having seen Escape From New York and The Warriors once too often on the Superstation (paired with recipes for "The Duke of New York A #1 Pork Chops" and "Baseball Furies Jalapeno Pepper Ballpark Franks"), but my vision of Harlem doesn’t include Crash Test Dummy Brad Roberts. And I think if my brain were to try and fuse the two, the image would probably be one of tall, skinny youths slam-dunking the songwriter’s severed head through a schoolyard hoop. Oh yeah, he got game. But that’s exactly where the Canadian found himself living recently, after deciding to move to New York but failing to find himself some digs in a pastier, more Caucasoid, part of town. "At first I was scared shitless – I was the only white guy for miles," Roberts says during a recent promotional stop in Calgary. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Roberts makes Preston Manning look funky. "Yes, exactly," he laughs. "I’m from Winnipeg-fuckin’-Manitoba. I’m as white as they come. I felt like a moving target, I figured, ‘When is somebody going to cut me up?’ To my surprise no one ever bothered me, I grew very comfortable in the neighbourhood, grew to love it, and started soaking up the atmosphere." The result – besides a new-found love of expletives – is the Dummies’ new CD Give Yourself A Hand, which is not so much a departure for the quintet as it is an entire flipping overhaul. Trip hoppy jungle rhythms, ambient textures and, at times, the complete castrato-ing of Roberts and his trademark baritone boom. For the most part it sounds like an entirely new band. Which after the lukewarm sales and mediocre reception of their last album, A Worm’s Life (it was especially disappointing considering its predecessor, God Shuffled His Feet, made the band a household name throughout North America), might not be such a bad idea. Look at Madonna – to survive, the beast must adapt to fit into its environment. Even if that means forsaking your folk pop roots and the fans who’ve come to expect a certain something when they shell out their ducats. But Roberts is adamant that Give Yourself A Hand is more of a happy accident than it is a calculated and safe play for a younger crowd. "The reason this album has a kind of black influence is not a manufactured response to poor record sales on our last album," he says. "It’s much more an accident that I wound up in Harlem... and discovered I had a falsetto – a staple of black music – and started writing in that direction just for fun. "In putting out this record I think we’re taking more of a risk than anything because it is a weird territory for us to go into and it’s hard to say who will play the record." There are three songs that shouldn’t have too much trouble finding their way onto the airwaves, or even the dancefloor for that matter, and that’s thanks to another big change the Dummies have made this time out – the use of Ellen Reid on lead vocals for "I’m Just Chillin’," "Get You In the Morning" and "A Little Something." Excluding the Dummies cover of XTC’s "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" on the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack, until now the gorgeously talented singer was relegated to backing vocals in favour of Roberts’s love-it or hate-it delivery. Reid’s trio of tracks are by far the finest songs on the album. Her vocals swim beautifully through the electro seas and remove the band even further from their past and towards artists like Morcheeba and Portishead. Given a blind taste-test using one of the songs, the name the Crash Test Dummies would never in a million years enter your head. "I’d love it if one of her songs became a single," Roberts says. "I think her material stands up amongst the strongest material on the record." In fact, Reid’s three tracks, as well as one or two others, bring up thoughts of further forays into dance music, as all would lend themselves wonderfully to some master remixing action. The mind reels at what someone more proficient with a mixing board could do with some of the songs on Give Yourself A Hand. But don’t hold your breath. It seems that Roberts’s embracing of black music has its limits. "This music lends itself to remixing, but I’m a little afraid of that because I find the remix culture has become one where it’s remix for the sake of remix, as opposed to remix because its an improvement or an interesting departure. That doesn’t hold true in all the cases, some remixes are better than the fucking thing they were working with to begin with, but a lot of it’s just getting more mileage out of the same tune and getting more money. "I like the record the way it stands," Roberts says. "I don’t really want to run around pulling my hair out worrying if some bastard’s going to come along and remix my tune and make it sound like shit." |
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