Junior Senior - Manchester Roadhouse - 3.3.03
Next time you're complaining about the lack of decent music in the UK thank the lord you didn't grow up in the musical waste ground that is Denmark. It's 24 hour Europop central with Aqua being the closest thing they have to musical culture and the alternative scene isn't much better with dire Radiohead wannabes the order of the day. Either way you're going to end up with razor blade at your wrists shouting turn off this or I kill myself. So how a band as effortlessly cool as Junior Senior came out of all this is anyone's guess, but somehow "Move Your Feet" became the first bonafide tune of the year heading straight in the charts at number 4.
Let me introduce you to the poptastic duo that are Junior Senior. Senior has to be the least unlikely superstar in waiting with enough spare tyres to open a garage and dress sense that is part retro hip hop and part remedial kid on the loose. Junior on the other hand looks about twelve and is the cute guitar hero of the group. Every song Junior Senior play is a breathe of fresh air cramming in more influences in one song than a bootleg cut-up session and yet their debut album "D-D-Don't Stop The Beat" is more eclectic than "Move Your Feet" would suggest. Although the comparisons between JS and The Avalanches are inevitable, these guys are not just another faceless dance duo. Backed with a full band including Pepsi and Shirley style backing vocalists for good measure the band take us through the last 50 years of pop music. "Go Junior Go" takes us back to the spirit of the Teen-C Revolution, "Rhythm Bandits" mixes disjointed breakbeats with the Beach Boys, "Move Your Feet" all Club Tropicana sunshine bliss, "Shake Me Baby" with it's classic 60s rock & roll and Dylan references and "Dynamite" with that classic Beatles steal.
Like the Polyphonic Spree, Electric 6 and the Darkness, Junior Senior provide some much needed light relief in the current climate. They're also a pop band in the old tradition where ridicule was nothing to be scared of and from a time where TOTP's wasn't full of choreographed puppets singing bland ballads on stools. In short they're the best thing to happen to pop music since Daphne & Celeste took over the world.
Alex McCann
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