BOBBY CONN - Macaroni

A vacuum cleaner. A search engine. An archive. A time machine. A boutade. A funfair. A hard slog. A pastime. Bobby Conn can be all of this and more. Bobby Conn is the shifty guy next door, the one who invites you over with the excuse of showing you his stamps and butterflies, and then actually does show you stamps and butterflies. A collector of other people's emotions, an exasperated, busy cataloguer, always cheerful, always willing... to show off what he can do. And he certainly doesn't care that his game has by now been rumbled — if anything, he carries on undeterred, spreading his passions far and wide: a formally flawless contraption, polished to perfection, a mechanism oiled to a tee that takes in the usual mix of glam-soul-funky-prog-pop-rock-wave-electro supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

And it's always very well-composed stuff, superbly performed, entertaining, but every year it looks a little more like a somewhat sterile exercise in style, decidedly chilly. His output fills the airwaves with sounds, notes and combinations, but it rarely sticks in the memory — not in the annals of history, but even in the day-to-day news cycle.

"Macaroni", like its predecessors, draws on a countless array of models. It has plenty of fine moments: it kicks off at full speed with the fast glam-pop of the title track, seventies in spirit but updated in sound, before moving into a kind of orchestral, declaimed soul on "Govt" and stroking the nostalgia of thirty-years-ago kids with "Face Blind", a glittering ballad enlivened by a sinuous Taylor-esque bass, blessed with a soft falsetto, atmospheric strings and a moog coda somewhere between "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and the closing theme of the cartoon Grisù. These are things that put you in a good mood right away, clear your airways and refresh pleasant memories.

And the instant pleasures certainly don't end there: "The Truth" is a funky-soul number bordering on disco, with orchestrations that nod to the quintessential magpie Jimi Tenor, while "More Than You Need" catapults you into a 1970s California that's taken a prize trip to Studio 54 — a trick pulled off rather well, and one often associated with Bobby's contemporaries, the Scissor Sisters. Also endearingly over-the-top is the rock attack of "Can't Stop The War", with free-rein drumming and distorted bass glissandos, and a vocal delivery à la Jon Spencer that suddenly finds itself joining the Bee Gees. A parody, a joke, a send-up, and yet entirely convincing.

That aggressiveness pays off well too on "Greed", somewhere between hair-metal posturing, heavy prog and musical theatre, and on "Underground Vktm", where at long last, after over half an hour, out pops the cardboard cutout of Meat Loaf roaring away on a motorbike! The big, super-choral finale of "Walker's Game", with everyone sweatily hugging each other and holding up lighters, goes straight for the tears, helped along by a heartfelt guitar solo.

In short, yet another Bobby Conn masterpiece. And who cares about the reviewer's inner turmoil... Macaroni, maybe discount-store stuff, but still cooked al dente and full of flavor.

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17/05/2012