It is a phenomenon how Marshall Cooper with "Backseat Lover" managed to record a debut album that is a single homage to the global pop culture of the 20th and 21st century without a single record lover in the world classifying the disc under the genre pop. The reason for this aural deception is likely the massive brass band sound, which manages to string together a wild ball of genre clichés and pop-cultural snippets into a varied and entirely new chain of associations of pop-cultural this world.
In this world of illusion, of course, a medium cannot be missing, and so the sound aesthetic of old-school analog cinema becomes the driving force, allowing the epic language of film music to be transformed into the striking sound of a brass band.
Elegantly, a wide variety of musical styles can be found among the 14 tracks. From swing, rock n' roll, funk and pop to classical elements, everything comes into the film music incubator, completed and refined by effective and analogue dialogue samples and a small but fine gaggle of guest musicians.
The result is an album full of soundtracks that never existed, but should have and that could be used in any Tarantino flick. Here and there the great Ennio Morricone even flashes a little bit mischievously through the parquet and makes clear which musical imprint obviously underlies the whole goings-on. "Backseat Lover" contains pieces that satirize themselves in such a wonderful way and still impress with compositional expressiveness and diversity. What sounds absurd is refreshingly turgid, detached and self-evident, emerging sentimentalities are consistently and explicitly broken by fine humor, irony and pointed wit. And so the record functions like a melange of pop-literary narrative and cultivated trashmovie, episodically stitched together in a concept album that sounds hopelessly nostalgic yet darn modern.
The tracks were composed and arranged by bandleader Manuel Hilleke, whose cinematic and musical socialization obviously finds lustful expression with "Backseat Lover". This penchant for lovemaking also translates into the record's artwork. There is no other way to explain the fact that each song is accompanied by an elaborate movie poster in the booklet, and that musical and tactile appeal ultimately form a congenial whole.
Text source and more information about this event at: http://hafen2.net
