Winning '11: 18 - Johnny Foreigner

Johnny Foreigner - Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything

Here's how I described Johnny Foreigner's first album in 2008:

High energy compressed melody, taking handclaps and pop sensibilities and burying them in enough fuzz that you're carried on along on its wave, barely stopping to glimpse meaning here and there. Equipped with some seriously inventive guitar playing and drumming, they frequently change direction completely with barely a pause for breath, or speed up songs beyond what seems like it should be breaking point. Throwing in noises and feedback as punctuation marks, they rush headlong from A to B to A again, coherance sacrificed if necessary.

Now at album number three, all of that still stands. Theirs is a distinctive sound and they've stuck with it to the extent that certain snatches of melody seem to crop up repeatedly from album to album. So do lyrics, though slightly less so here than on Grace and the Bigger Picture. It seems to be a concious decision, as part of the same consistent aesthetic that sees the same Pac-Man ghosts appear on all their artwork (lurking on the back cover in this case). It still works. Only a few drum machine pulses and "You! Me! Dancing!" in reverse post-rock coda make "Hulk Hoegaarden, Gin Kinsella, David Duvodkany, etc" anything particularly new for them but it's as enjoyable a sugar rush rock song as they've ever done.

The sprawling and unprecedented 55 minutes and 17 tracks of Johnny Foreigner vs. Everything does see them do new things well too, though. The chiming nostalgia of "200X", Kelly giving a fragile and emotional lead vocal with Alexei as barely more solid moral support for the chorus. "(Don't) Show Us Your Fangs" acting as the flipside to their manic early Idlewild tendencies by sounding like a superior The Remote Part ballad. "You vs. Everything" takes what may be their best and perkiest chorus ever, makes brass blasts an integral part of its feel and goes on to a meta 'you can slow it all down...' middle section with mournful brass before the triumphant return of the chorus. Elsewhere there are stylophone duets, two rather charming spoken word things, and a band beginning to grow into a wider vision which could yet see something different and even more special emerge..