The sonic family trees of The Cure and Shellyan Orphan have always been intricately entwined, and not least resulting in Babacar, a band made up of members of both outfits. So the arrival of Vamberator, featuring the former’s Boris Williams and the latter’s Jem Tayle perhaps isn’t that unexpected.
Perhaps what is a surprise is the sheer eclecticism of the music. The album wanders across the musical landscape, picking up any and every shiny sonic thing that grabs its magpie-like creative eye—from soul and R&B to glam rock and art pop, a blend of the analog and digital, the old and new, the mainstream and the mercurial.
“I Used to be Lou Reed” kicks The Age of Loneliness in fine style, street smart, NYC references, and name checks over a soul-funk glam rock blend, like Marvin Gaye collaborating with Roxy Music, and the results are as brilliant as that sounds.
There are hazy, occidental meets orient al slices of chamber pop with “Pilgrim,” drifting folk-pop courtesy of “I Need Contact,” squalling weaves of psychedelia via “Zebra Butterfly Swallowtail,” and the title track’s, perhaps unexpected, given its name, energetic nu-disco grooves.
This is such a diverse and devilish album, one that thwarts expectations, is unsecondguessable, and covers so much sonic ground, hops genres, eras, sounds, and styles, even within the confines of each individual song. It finds the word eclectic in the dictionary and underlines it with three bold slashes of eyeliner!
