Here's a theory: For a genre to legitimize itself, it needs to have more than just good artists; you also need bad or mediocre ones to provide contrast. In the still embryonic field of indie rock-dance, we've been blessed with an early run of quality bands, like Love Is All, The Go! Team, and United State of Electronica. Taking inspiration from primary dance sources like Daft Punk and the Avalanches rather than the already rock-filtered sound of Gang of Four or Happy Mondays, these groups have kept the indie kids from regressing to crossed-arms days, opening up new avenues of high-energy questionable-fi genre scrapbooks along the way.
With 2004's "You Are the Generation Who Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve", British duo Johnny Boy made a strong argument for inclusion in that upper echelon of call-it-what-you-will. Well received by critics-- even the ones that don't get paid by the word-- "Generation" hit the perfect balance between the epic and the homemade: the "Be My Baby" drums, the TASCAM Wall of Sound, the exuberant yell-along climax. No small accomplishment to make one of the decade-so-far's best singles on the first try, but the qualifying test of whether the band could stretch the promise of "Generation" across an LP frame still loomed large.
Sadly, the rest of Johnny Boy never matches the brilliance of "Generation", which bats leadoff and provides the record's immediate peak. Playing the genre mix-and-match angle may seem like an easy task, merely requiring a mastery of the unexpected juxtaposition, but unless the approach is meticulously assembled, like the Polaroid pastiches of the Go! Team, it can come out as a malformed mess.
Besides a few notable and promising exceptions, unfortunate or over-busy chimeras are largely what Johnny Boy deals out here, collages that assemble their way out of emotional range. "Bonnie Parker's 115th Dream" is the easiest target, a junkyard of "I Want Candy" drums, sax squeals emulating DJ scratches, rapping 101, incongruous sample breaks, noir horns, and a happy-chant chorus. Songs slum through half-hearted stabs at jazzy noir ("Wall Street") or snotty punk ("Formaldehyde") seemingly just because they can, while breakbeats and horn parts turn up in places that don't seem so much carefully chosen as opportunities to vacantly "weird" up the proceedings.
Some of these genre excursions may have been more successful were it not for the limited range of primary singer Lolly, whose sweet Claudia Gonson-like voice fit snugly within the Lo-town of "Generation", but finds itself overextended trying to Beth Gibbons her way through the trip-hoppier parts or keep the sugar-pop of "Livin' in the City" from becoming too shrill. It's not until the album-closing "Johnny Boy Theme", also previously released, that the band regains its footing, intercutting girl-group sighs with clattering breaks and sleigh-bell fringe, while finally using the good old boy-girl vocal interplay between Lolly and partner Davo to full effect.
Between the goalposts of the two already familiar highlights, the missteps of Johnny Boy's debut draw attention to the relative successes of their peers: the way U.S.E. flirts with but avoids S Club 7 cavities, the way Ian Parton's vinyl-raiding symphonies for the Go! Team articulate diversity without sacrificing cohesion. Here, Johnny Boy show themselves to be, at this point, primarily a singles act, which may eventually not be a slight in the still-evolving world of dance-friendly indie/indie-friendly dance, but which, for now, means they don't quite measure up to the competition.
