Delicatessen - There's No Confusing Some People

IF ONLY IT WASN'T ALWAYS so easy to judge a CD by its cover. 'There's No Confusing Some People' (witty, almost a pun, suggests, hey, 'quirky' attitude) features on its sleeve a model of a farmer (or is it?) shagging a donkey up the arse (or is he just riding it? 'Riding', eh? Could be a euphemism, or is it? EH?!) like something off The Adam & Joe Show. And the urge to say, "Go home, you posh student tossers!" is equally hard to resist.

However there is more subtlety to Delicatessen's oeuvre than that might suggest. Which is not to say it works any better. The tone is set with 'Another Meal Turns Up', in which Neil Carlill tries to growl like Tom Waits replete with suitable cod-vaudevillian soundtrack. Likewise, 'Lightbulbs And Moths' is so self-consciously 'We are weird' that it just irritates. More frustratingly, the songs give the impression of being conceptual snippets of a bigger picture which hasn't yet been filled in.

They often go for David Devant-style strangeness with a warped sense of humour, but for starters it's too stylised to work, and for enders it's not funny. Instead it sounds like a sixth-form avant-garde musical with bad acting to match. Hints of malevolent atmospherics and melancholy tunes are present in 'Various Pets' and 'He Killed Himself In 1980', but again don't build into anything memorable, by which point you're asking what they're trying to achieve.

Confused? You might be. Bored? More likely.

4/10

Johnny Cigarettes