REVOLVER:Spend an hour listening to daytime pop radio and you'll feel like you've fallen into a Edvard Munch painting. Between Pro Tools, sound compression and the now ubiquitous Autotune, it's all just aural fast food so far removed from any sense of musicality that's it's beyond laughable. It's a meretricious parade in which style reigns supreme over content.
Dr Dre, interviewed several years ago, pointed out the window of his studio at a young woman walking down the street.
“See that girl? Regardless of whatever level of talent she may or may not have, including absolutely zero talent, I could take her in here and make her No 1 all around the world. Such is the technology that’s now out there.”
Play a late 1950s rock’n’roll song and compare it to whatever talent show idiot is No 1 this week. You’ll be shocked at how far today’s music has been removed from its primordial roots. The building blocks of rock – blues, country, gospel, doo-wop – have been replaced with a something that sounds technically perfect but is a corruption of
the genre. It’s McMusic; over one billion served.
Listen to that
rock’n’ roll track and be reminded of how visceral the sound is, a boogie- woogie blues rhythm with a backbeat that caused a “moral panic” first time around. It’s a sound that can still shock, if only because of the contrast to today’s overly processed mush.
Which is why The Baseballs should be your favourite new band. Granted, they began as a novelty act: there are three of them, they’re from Germany and they specialise in taking today’s chart- toppers “back to their true calling – rock’n’roll music”. Songs by the likes of Rhianna and Beyoncé are stripped of their manifold layers of studio-enhanced effects and basically covered as a young Elvis would have sung them
For example, The Baseballs' take on Rhianna's Umbrellaknocks the Manic Street Preachers' version out of the park. It's an inspired, brilliantly executed take on a modern classic that could have been recorded at Memphis's Sun Studios in the mid-1950s.
The song has already notched up a few gazillion hits on YouTube (and the accompanying video is great as well). A few weeks ago it was the most added song on BBC radio and it has been a massive hit all over Europe. However, Irish radio remains oblivious to the heady appeal of The Baseballs.
Even better, perhaps, is the trio's approach to Leona Lewis's Bleeding Love. They remove the somewhat strained power-ballad core of the song, move it up-tempo and give it a delightful doo-wop overhaul.
Novelty or not, The Baseballs' debut album, Strike, has been a Top 10 fixture on European album charts for the last while. Not everything on it works; they only emerge with a score draw from their attempt at Beyoncé's Crazy in Love, and their version of the Plain White T's Hey There Delilahshouldn't have been allowed on the album. But their version of Angels impressed Robbie Williams so much he asked them to play at his upcoming wedding.
The Baseballs should really excel as a festival band. You could put them anywhere (Oxegen, Glastonbury, Electric Picnic, some death metal hooley, the Brian Eno-curated Brighton Festival) and they’d be a talking point.
With so many overly sensitive, earnest types clogging up the festival bills, The Baseballs would operate as a musical counterpoint – a reminder of popular music’s roots, and of a time when music was more for the body than the mind.
So somebody please book The Baseballs for one of this summer’s Irish festivals and, in the meantime, have a listen to their Umbrella cover. See thebaseballs.com
