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Chungking
Imagine Goldfrapp & The Banshees meeting the Twisted Scissor Sisters down the discotheque, or a gothic electropop adventure.You may know Chungking - Brighton based, born and bred - from their rather splendid and critically well-received album The Hungry Years a couple of years back. This isn't very helpful, and you might have to forget everything you thought you already knew, because for their second album Stay Up Forever Chungking - Sean Hennessey and Jessie Banks - have delivered an almighty beast of a modern pop album. If The Hungry Years was Chungking flicking through the papers while eating a croissant on Sunday morning, then Stay Up Forever is the sound of the band kicking off their shoes and dancing right through Saturday night and beyond. 'Love Is Here To Stay' is the perfect example of this; a sassy slice of low slung, dirty funk that, according to Sean is a "filthy song which says it's okay to put your hands down somebody's pants and not necessarily mine - get the motor running and we'll stick our hands down everyone's pants'". Recorded almost entirely in a room above 'Mad' Frankie Fraser's pub in Brighton, Stay Up Forever takes Chungking in a new direction, but that's not all to have changed since the band's early days. While they were once ‘an item' their partnership is now strictly business, and what remains is a solid affiliation concentrating on shared instincts and an intimate ability to second-guess ideas, melodies and production touches. Inevitably this is, at times, an incredibly intimate album.
"Essentially," Jessie explains, "what we love is song. That's as close as we can come to defining our favourite music. With this album specifically we've tried to make a good pop album."
Written: 1st Jan, 70
Read: 1990 times
