Joakim Monsters and Silly Songs

When acid house first got picked up by the red top press in the UK, the headlines were generally pitched to induce strokes among the elderly and infirm. Skinny, pill-munching teens dressed in clothing that would make even the most tartrazine-addled 5-year-old baulk; mass exoduses from small towns to ramshackle barns and cowpat-caked fields; a name that at once brought images of drug-induced attempts at flight and flesh-melting terror to the mind. More horrific than any of this stuff was, however, the music: repetitive, often weighing in at over 6 minutes, and (worst of all) almost completely rejecting the traditional song structure. It made every other so-called uprising in popular music of the 20th century (punk, Elvis etc etc) seem as revolutionary as abandoning toilet tissue in favour of wiping your bum with kitchen roll. And yes, I have heard of Can/John Coltrane, but I'm talking about music that got into the singles charts, filled seaside tat shops with dodgy t-shirts, and gave your mum something to moan about over her bran flakes. Pop music, in other words.

The reason why it's far easier to name classic acid house tracks than classic acid house albums is fairly obvious: 12"s are aimed at clubs, whereas electronic albums generally get played at home afterwards, while you try to keep it together enough to make tea/find rizlas/solve the great theological mysteries of our time. Put together an album of 4/4, of-their-time bangers and you're not only accused of being one-paced, you're pretty much condemning yourself to obscurity from 6 months on until 10 years later (at least) when everyone remoulds/remakes what you were doing back then (see big beat, electro, punk, acid house and every other genre, with the possible exception of skiffle, although The Libertines weren't far off rejuvenating that one). Meanwhile, you're divorced, working at Kwik Fit and driving your unfortunate workmates to gouge their own eardrums out with tales of how you invented the whole thing. Justice ARE the new Daft Punk, after all, and their new album was pretty much obsolete before they'd even released it.

Oh yeah: Joakim. Joakim has gone down the well-worn road of making his name in clubland with a clutch of well-received electro 12"s (I Wish You Were Gone, Drumtrax), before delivering an album that would be as welcome in a club as a gaggle of syringe-wielding morris dancers. Electronic producers on the verge of releasing a long player spend their every interview blathering on about making something ‘that works as an album, not just a collection of songs', and making sure that everyone knows that they do more than one thing, like more than one style of music. Most of them grew up on proper, traditional songwriting like indie, grunge, goth and metal (it's all over the new electro revival, so just accept it. You're a metaller, and not in that ironic, Iron Maiden t-shirt-wearing way either). Monsters and Silly Songs has two proper club rinsers (the aforementioned 12"s), a decent, Goblin-esque track that could've soundtracked a ropey ‘70s Italian zombie movie (Sleep Under Hollow Tree), post-punk done better than half the lauded progenitors of that notoriously patchy time in music (Rocket Pearl), a few gentle ones to soothe your addled brain (Palo Alto, The Devil with No Tail), and one of the loveliest, ‘80s-inspired electronic pop songs I've heard in an age (Lonely Hearts). There's four monster-themed interludes, which seemingly involve Joakim dicking around in the studio with some effects for no apparent reason, but if you're still up at 5am on a Saturday morning, this is what you need to be playing (if you can still see straight enough to find it).