Returning after an extended hiatus, the British duo
Amp (singer
Karine Charff and multi-instrumentalist
Richard Walker) offer the uncharacteristically band-oriented, almost poppy
Us. With
Walker joined by three regular collaborators (longtime
Julian Cope sideman
Donald Ross Skinner on guitar and bass, Ray Dickaty on saxophone, and
Marc Challans on guitar, bass, drums, and occasional songwriting) and largely sticking to concise pop song structures, this is by some distance
Amp's most conventional album, with only the last two tracks "Endgame" and "Iconisis" delving into the space rock bliss-outs of prior albums like
Astralmoonbeamprojections. Only
Walker's trademark fondness for the slow layering of musical elements from near-total silence into crazed cacophony (check out the last few minutes of "Yousay" for a particularly fine example) marks this as an
Amp album.
Challans' beat-heavy electronics tend to overpower
Walker, and the placement of
Charff at the forefront instead of her usual place lurking near the back of the mix only amplifies the thinness of her voice and her fundamentally meaningless lyrics. The album reaches its nadir with "Think Don't Think," a collage of layered TV and radio broadcasts mixed with Dickaty's heavily treated saxophone that sounds vaguely inspired by
David Byrne and
Brian Eno's
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts but lacks that album's wit, craft, and conceptual clarity. While
Us isn't an entirely bad album, the handful of good songs are offset by the overall sense that
Amp is simply better than this brand of indie electro-pop, or at least has been in the past.