Scritti Politti - ‘White Bread Black Beer’ (Rough Trade) Released 29/05/06

 

Not to be confused with Milli Vanilli or Gino Ginelli, Scritti Politti has a voice that’s all his own and sweeter than Tutti Frutti (sorry). Like Malcolm McClaren, Gartside quickly got bored of the punk and avant-garde DIY scene of the late 70s and ‘got down’ with the R’n’B and hip hop sounds pumping out of New York, culminating in a cross-Atlantic smash album ‘Cupid & Psyche ‘85’ in – you guessed it – 1985. And straight from the off, ‘White Bread Black Beer’ wears its Afro-American influences on it’s sleeve – opener ‘The Boom Boom Bap’ pays homage to the sounds that have shaped Gartside’s artistic impulses, sung in that distinctive (and, to this palate, rather cheesy) faux-American accent. 

 

But, refreshingly, this album doesn’t stay in that one place for any length of time before Gartside’s attention speeds off elsewhere. Songs arrive in fragments, such as ‘No Fine Lines’ and ‘Window Wide Open’, or made up of many parts, as on the Hunky Dory-esque album highlight ‘Dr Abernathy’. As with the latter track, the guitar (especially the acoustic) is heavily present on ‘White Bread Black Beer’, with songs such as ‘Road To No Regret’ and ‘Robin Hood’ sounding almost like folktronica next to more typical Scritti Politti material such as ‘E Eleventh Nuts’ and ‘After Six’. Gartside always did have his ear to the ground – and this record proves he’s still listening.

 

With ideas scrambling all over ‘White Bread Black Beer’, it should really be a great album, but somehow it isn’t, instead feeling a little undercooked – which, after 7 years in the oven, isn’t really good enough. The minimal production suits individual tracks but over the course of an entire album it begins to underwhelm. The shorter songs sound unfinished while longer ones sound unfocused, and for an album that has these flaws it’s painfully long at 51 minutes.

 

In a sense ‘White Bread Black Beer’ is a marrying of Scritti Politti’s early lo-fi, DIY aesthetic to the slicker, pop approach of his mainstream career. Maybe these worlds just can’t be reconciled. Or maybe, and more probably, Gartside has just been operating too freely of any external quality control for this album to be of any interest to anyone other than Double G himself and his most loyal of fans. Whatever. ‘White Bread Black Beer’ is an interesting listen, but interesting is such an uninteresting word.