Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
It can be of hardly any surprise to find that the latest album from the stable of Madness doesn’t match the career defining album The Liberty of Norton Folgate released in 2009. However, this should not stop the loveable rogues of north London continue their 21st century renaissance as one of the best bands to have graced the British charts in the last 40 years.
Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da doesn’t have the edge of playful melodrama that The Liberty…provided fans of the band the sense of disturbing realism that filtered through every track and gave the songs a mix of ghoulish Victorian sideshow, London suburbs and cheeky and well observed lyrics. What it does have is the next step in the evolution of Madness. Every band has to grow up, change with the times or else die an early and inglorious death.
Madness in the late 1970’s and 1980’s were the group of choice for a lot of British teenagers, a few years away and those same teenagers had grown up and were looking for something different from the reformed band, Madness delivered, with a huge smile plastered all over their indomitable faces and with exceptional style. Oui Oui Si Si…gives the listener a chance to stay in the present day, to know the comfortable and revel in it but give it just that little extra twist that Madness drew upon in albums such as The Rise and Fall.
The album opens up with My Girl 2, a wonderful song that turns time on its head and shows that the dependency of the early hit for Madness has become inverted and now the man, the boy from the early song, no longer finds the relationship suffocating and is proud to be her man. However with all great sequels, the girl has also changed and Suggs’ admiration seems one sided and the woman has grown up.
The sound, that sweet, casual, wonderful sound that made early fans identify with them so much fills this new album from every pore whilst shying away from being pastiche and cliché ridden. It is a sound that people fell in love with and they retain that core element throughout songs such as the excellent Leon, How Can I Tell You and the superb 70’s throwback political angst of Death of a Rude Boy.
There is no group like Madness, no one comes close and whilst they are still able to make music that is interesting and heartfelt and it is good to have them around. Oui Oui Si SI Ja Ja Da Da may not reach the heights of The Liberty of Norton Folgate, nothing the band probably ever do again will but they still manage to raise one of the biggest smiles on any face as the realisation hits the listener that Madness are just one step beyond any of their closest competition.
Ian D. Hall