Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
The hunger never really stopped. Despite leaving the main music arena for new bands to enter the fray, to take on the semi goliaths that the 1990s offered, Tommy Scott and Franny Griffiths kept checking out the view from the side of the cinema screen and took in the odd tour with new cohorts and sublime musicians, Phil Hartley, Ryan Clarke and Alan Jones. Now, they have finally decided enough is enough, the epic nature and humour that Space provide the nation as a studio outfit has finally and thankfully returned with their album Attack of the Mutant 50ft Kebab.
The love that Tommy Scott has for B Movies comes through the fantastic observant lyrics, the waltz into the macabre, the boogie into the cadaverous and the meaningful journey into the humour filled cavern of modern day Britain and the need for a life less serious is prominent in every track. The nature of the man’s writing means that even on a subject that others would baulk at, Mr Scott finds there is room for a little humour and social commentary. On tracks such as She’s In Love With The Boy In The BodyBag, the brilliant Anthony’s Brainwaves, the obliging Guest List To Hell and the album title track Attack of the Mutant 50ft Kebab, with its allusion to western culture’s upsetting of the natural world to the point where even our food is now fighting back, all come with a grin attached; what better way to get a pertinent message across than by delivering it with a grin.
The sound that Space produce on the album, the direction of a master conductor in the frame of Franny Griffiths, sees Phil Hartley, Ryan Clarke and Alan Jones play with exciting vigour and almost untold dynamism which has been carefully crafted across the band’s live shows since reforming. It shows a determination to inject something that has been lost in the last 20 years, a piece of unhinged reality, not some corporate funded excuse in which a couple of judges pronounce sentence to whoops of joy, but of music played to be enjoyed, to be scoured for its lyrical content and notes of proper emotion and expression. Not dance to the tune of a monster.
Space has delivered their first album for many years and it’s enormous.
Ian D. Hall