Dance party at the United Nations! Relaxing after a long session hammering out trade sanctions, human rights accords, and peacekeeping missions, the delegates have retired to the local disco for a night of lettin' loose and puttin' their weight on it! On one side of the dance floor, the British and French delegates are ignoring centuries of rivalry in order to do a mean freak nasty on each other. Representatives from Russia, Peru, and Laos rope people into doing the Electric Slide. People form a circle around the delegate from Syria, who is giving a full ceremonial dress demonstration of his reputed breakdancing prowess.
If these throwdowns really do occur down at the old UN, the DJ has no doubt been primarily spinning Handcream for a Generation, the latest release from London-by-way-of-India Cornershop. This album, with its effortless genre-hopping and EPCOT cultural sampling, is the most globalist musical statement since Michael Jackson's video for "Black or White"-- though, uh, minus the crotch-grabbing and car-smashing. Ringleader Tjinder Singh has spent the last five years throwing musical influences from every region of the planet into his giant melting pot, ending up with a record so multi-culti it's received funds from the World Bank and been name-dropped in a Sunday column by Thomas Friedman.
That Cornershop would be the band to take this "It's a Small World" approach is no big surprise, given the poly-ethnic nature of their previous records for David Byrne's Luaka Bop imprint. The band broke out of the world music ghetto with 1997's When I Was Born for the 7th Time, an album that delighted in throwing traditional Indian heritage and instrumentation up against pretty much every Western music style in the book. Somewhat overrated by the sitar-happy critical population, 7th Time nevertheless had a handful of great, inventive pop songs ("Brimful of Asha," "Good to Be On the Road Back Home Again") amidst an overabundance of interesting-once-or-twice sound collage filler and a gimmicky Punjabi "reclamation" of "Norwegian Wood."
Handcream, by comparison, is even more of a shape-shifter than its acclaimed predecessor, and likewise, it's less uneven and cohesive. Changing outfits as often as a runway model, Cornershop jumps from soul-funk roll call intro to children's choir-accompanied synth-rock to glowstick-waving house to organ-loop hip-hop to Jamaican reggae dub, and that's only counting up to the halfway point. It's an exhilarating but disorienting ride, given the big budget production, the rapid-fire guest appearances (including Noel Gallagher and Rob Swift), and a relentlessly upbeat pace tightly calibrated to provoke shaking of the booty in all races.
Fortunately, this versatility indicates that Singh isn't looking to further pad his bank account with a collection of profitable "Asha" clones. Among the album's twelve tracks, only "Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform" and "Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III" land close to their big hit's on-loan-from-Luna chord progression and singsong melody. While neither tune has the memory claws of "Asha" (which I'll bet five dollars is running through your head right this second), "Raised Platform" has some delightfully catchy nonsense lyrics about Jaws and dodos, and the thick-riffed "Rocky" narrowly survives an appearance by that most insidious of rock cliches, the gospel backup singer.
The rest is kept strictly mirrorball, highlighted by the Studio 54 glitter promised on Singh's politics-and-disco side project Clinton. Upgrading that group's "People Power" from ironic bare-bones disco to the real deal itself, the song grooves along to swear bleeps, phone rings, and cricket chirps, promising socialism through leisure suits and feathered boas. "The London Radar" has a similar amount of fun with modernized Saturday Night Fever elements, soldering a bunch of airline-related sound clips to swirling strings and popping bass. "Music Plus One" and "Slip the Drummer One" are dance tracks more ecstacy than cocaine, employing vocoders, synthesizers, and turntable scratches courtesy of X-Ecutioner Swift (on loan from Linkin Park, we see).
While these tracks are indicative of Cornershop's ability to enjoyably replicate different eras of nightclub music, one often gets the feeling that the band's just trying on costumes without much in the way of original modifications. Drafting Chicago soulman Otis Clay for emcee duties on the opening "Heavy Soup" and a Rasta for the Lee Perry homage "Motion the 11" lends authenticity to the band's genre explorations, but also dilutes their own sound by easing up on the Punjabi elements. There aren't many fresh hybrid creations in the vein of 7th Time's Automator-produced Bolly-Wu "Candy Man" here, unless you count the cumbersome 14-minute "Spectral Mornings," which attempts to pit late '60s Dead against Side A of The Concert for Bangladesh.
With so much stylistic hopscotch, the album feels a little disjointed as well, despite mysterious recurring vocal samples of song titles ("slip the drummer one," "motion the eleven") popping up in unexpected places. As multilingual, uncategorizable, culture-spanning concept albums by artists with "Corn" in their moniker, Cornelius' Point has Handcream beat by a long shot. But with a record so obviously intended to make you dance first and ask questions later, such analysis is fairly irrelevant. Tjinder Singh and Cornershop want to throw a world party down at the discotheque, and in the wake of tragic Ally McBeal cancellations and David Beckham injuries, dancin's probably just what us six billion kids need.
