The New Sound (LP)

Geordie's debut solo album boasts a brand of high quality, all-embracing alternative pop fun not heard in a very long time, walking the line between the ridiculous and brilliant with a teflon-coated aplomb.

How the record came about is a thing to marvel at. Over thirty session musicians were involved in its making, on two continents. Greep says, "Half of the tracks were done in Brazil, with local musicians pulled together at the last minute. They'd never heard anything I'd done before, they were just interested in the demos I'd made. The tracking was all done in one, maybe two days."

The spirit of Greep's increasingly febrile and furtive soliloquies simultaneously calls to mind both Frank Zappa and Frank Sinatra, with a healthy dash of Scott Walker sprinkled throughout.

The instrumental title track is a jazz-funk workout that could double as a soundtrack for a TV series or the intro music for a Broadway musical. Brass, wah-wah pedal and bass stabs, choruses and polyrhythms, all fizz and tumble around the place creating a sense of excitement and expectation. Tracks often oscillate from whispers to shouts, and start and end on a bang.

The stories themselves act as a shopping list of the Active Male Imagination. A series of vignettes, where Geordie Greep plays the role of emcee and conductor. The characters we hear from are engaged in wild fantasies and situations in which they inevitably falter. "The main theme of the record is desperation; someone who is kidding themselves that they have everything under control, but they don't." Here Greep gives color to a set of imaginings which include cannibalism, being boiled alive, and a woman giving birth to a goat.