The Korgis 2024
In order to suggest our world’s disjointed and to tie our common consciousness together again, British purveyors of progressive pop split their message down the middle and create new world order of their own.
UN-United Nations
When a project has “Blue” and “Red” halves, one is inclined to think either of blood vessels’ diagram – and the record on offer is quite sanguine, indeed – or about The Fabs – and, in fact, the band behind it know something about THE BEATLES – but then, THE KORGIS’ songs have always come to and from the heart and demonstrated heightened melodicism and healthy sense of humor. The ensemble seem to be in two minds about the duality of this endeavor, with the liner notes to its first chapter referring to “a double album” and to the second airing the “pair of albums” descriptor, yet of course, the two discs create a single experience, as depicted even in their cover artwork. For all the looseness of the concept on display, the platters’ order gets defined by “Beginning” split into their chamber bookends, the song’s substantial part forming the entire cycle’s finale, and by a couple of numbers from the “Blue” half reprised on “Red” to tie all the, well, loose ends.
The sleeves that house the discs aren’t exactly blue and red, though, and the azure and pink hues reflect the way the music’s been toned down in comparison with "Kartoon World" – the quintet’s previous set of fresh material whose semi-imaginary globality burst in technicolor; instead, the tracks of “UN-United Nations” deal with the twilight-of-the-gods kind of reality check. The key to it might be located in the album’s last quarter, in the warmly nostalgic glimmer of “Hey Old Friend” which at a certain point checks into 1979, the year this group issued their debut, and the temporal aspect is an important aspect of the platters’ proceedings – the vaudevillian “Good Old Days Of The Cold War” and the psychedelia “End Of An Era Feeling” unfold memorable dewy-eyed panoramas of past dramas and present echoes, and “Mud Huts” flaunt mellifluous vocal harmonies to turn back millennia – but the record’s geographical facet is what’s propelling the momentum here. However, while one can approach the nineteen pieces’ flow as a puzzle, there’s no prizing for guessing what countries “Born Under A Full Moon” and “Sex On Saturday” – the former an acoustically tinged, sensual bossa nova, the latter a motorik slice of electrically charged Europop – dwell in, for basking in the light of “Coffee In New York” and “Matala Moon” which ooze soul in spades, and for adding individual reveries to the arresting, riff-driven vistas of “Prison Break” and “Another Perfect Day In St. Tropez” carry over from the first disc to the second.
As James Warren, John Baker, Al Steele and Danielle Nicholls interweave their voices with Paul Smith’s ever-shifting grooves, a series of aural adventures pass in front of the listeners’ ears; still, it’s the intimate ballads like the orchestral “You Haunt Me” and the mini-epics like “Oppenheimer (Stuck In This Moment)” that prove to be truly breathtaking. And once one’s rapture is evoked, the audience should never feel divided – such music as this must serve as a unifying factor. A wondrous album!
*****
