Box Codax - Hellabuster

Few who heard their first record would have expected this loose outfit that convenes in the ultra-rare and highly irregular gaps between Franz Ferdinand's activities to outgrow the limited ambitions of a side project, let alone to create such a glittering ball of sheer pop invention as their second album Hellabuster, from the opening title track, which switches time signatures like a werewolf going through mood swings, via the glamourous Moroder disco beach romance Seven Silvers, the eerie falsetto harmonies of Radical Plains, the soundtrack to a chemically enhanced kids' party that is Choco Pudding, the crime mystery in a wrinkly raincoat vibes evoked by Pour Moi, the giddy games arcade hysteria of I Won't Come Back, followed by Charade, which is all pent-up desire in a self-catering holiday apartment, Nothing More Than Anything with its Spanish guitars and drunken waltzes colliding with Sandy Moffat, a punk song seemingly accompanied by the Church of Jonathan Richman School Choir, Inanimate Inamorato, a lament for a “timid inanimate friend”, the cinematic solipsism of My Room and the android-on-half-empty-batteries reggae-disco of No Trains, all the way to Dawning, the wistful sibling to “Seven Silvers”.

“We always wanted to record these songs properly,” McCarthy explains, “I wanted to get to a point where you can really delve into the album without wondering why we had recorded it in such a slapdash way. I wanted people to be able to really listen to it.“

Another part of the secret behind the transformation of Box Codax from a rickety vehicle of carelessly wasted nearly-there pop songs into a well-oiled (if internally melancholy) hit machine lies in their expansion from a two- to a three-piece: On Hellabuster, Alexander Ragnew, charismatic German poet and gloomy mystery man (“He loves his weltschmerz”) shares vocal and lyrical duties with Austrian-born, London-based artist Manuela Gernedel. Ragnew's unapologetically strong accent sounds like an extreme version of a seventies Kevin Ayers doing his best Nico impression, contrasting with Gernedel's ethereally detached delivery. “I love her voice,” Nick McCarthy declares. “That's why I married her.” So we've cleared that up as well then. “Even though, funnily enough, I do some singing too”, he adds, “I never really wanted to, but it sounded pretty good, so we left it in.”

Tracklisting:

1. Hellabuster 2. Seven Silvers 3. Radical Plains 4. Choco Pudding 5. Pour Moi 6. I Won't Come Back 7. Charade 8. Nothing More Than Anything 9. Sandy Moffat 10. Inanimate Inamorato 11. My Room 12. No Trains 13. Dawning

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