The Egg
Albumen (Discovery)
by Lex Marburger
Every once in a while, an album comes along that shows the hidden connections between unrelated styles of music. For example, John Coltrane’s Africa Brass brought forth the steamy jungle of African music inherent in jazz (the connection was stronger in earlier days, but by the ’60s jazz had become its own entity). Saccharine Trust’s We Became Snakes showed that punk could be as psychedelic as Captain Beefheart (not his Trout Mask Replica, though, that’s about a weird as you can get). Now The Egg shows that there’s a relationship between techno and that bastard jazz offspring, fusion. Their album, Albumen, has all the beats to make a raver dance, the keyboards that get a crowd jumping, and a lightheartedness that won’t get anyone down. But for all its electro stylings, The Egg plays everything with live instruments. That’s right. All the critics who said that drum machines could play things that live drummers couldn’t didn’t figure in the factor that the human animal is infinitely adaptable. The drummers got better, or at least moved from their fusion beginnings into something better (you think Elvin Jones or Dennis Chambers can’t play the jungle beats of “Firestarter?” Think again, buddy). There’s a lot of disco on Albumen too, lots of Superfly guitar and heavy string patches. And the whole of it could’ve easily come from Chick Corea’s head, with two major exceptions. Where the fusion wanks fill their music with complex chord structures and intellectual games to show how smart they are, The Egg breaks it down into simple, repetitive elements, catapulting it into the techno dance realm. Every riff is a small piece of the whole song, and it’s looped into an overall groove that’s absolutely perfect for E’s and Wizz, like on “The Fat Boy Goes To The Cinema,” with wicka-wicka guitar, a short flute riff that becomes the melody, and a completely Donna Summer bassline propels the entire song onto the dance floor. Add some funky clavinet sounds, and you’ve got a recipe for getting down! The most complex thing about Albumen is, of course, the drums. They skitter around the songs, funking it up in a James Brown meets Orbital kind of way. The song “Sunglasses” has a drum break in it that you’d swear was sequenced. But no, it’s just one guy, thrashing it out behind his kit. The other difference is that everyone in the band is obviously having too much fun to be arrogant about their music. The songs have no pretensions to being great intellectual works of art, rather they’re great songs to shake your little booty to. Throw this on at a party, and people will be jumping up and down, laughing and (if you’re lucky) throwing their clothes off to dance on the table. I tried it. It works.
