In the passages during which the band sit on their hands a little more firmly, though, ‘Grey Lantern’ is a delight. Indeed, the six-song run from ‘You Who Do You Hate’ to ‘Naked Twister’, despite still being distracted occasionally by shiny add-ons, discovers a subtlety absent not just from the album’s opening section but also from huge swathes of British music that immediately preceded it – and in that intensity of concentration lies the record’s appeal. ‘Wide Open Space’ and ‘Disgusting’, in particular – the former with its soaring gleam borrowed from Radiohead’s ‘Lucky’, the latter with its swaggering slink edging almost into funk – showed exactly how coherent and persuasive Mansun could be when they weren’t obsessing over themselves.
But self-obsession too often gets the better of ‘Attack Of The Grey Lantern’. The self-mythologising video for ‘Taxloss’, at pains to explain to its audience just how clever it thinks it’s being, is perhaps the most egregious example, but the hidden track, in which Paul Draper informs his public that the album they’ve just heard is meaningless (“You believe all of this, you can’t see it’s a spoof,” he snarls) comes over not as some witty disclaimer at the end of a knotty album, but simply as superciliously snotty. It leaves a sour, contemptuous taste, and an album that could have been a bracing faceful of ice-cold water after Britpop’s intemperance exits instead with a shrug as smug as its forebears.
With recurring themes and characters, and a whiff of storyline, ‘Attack Of The Grey Lantern’ had the vague markings of that most pungent signifier of Serious Music, the concept album. However, Draper admitted while promoting the record that the idea was undercooked, leaving it as just “half a concept album – a con album”. He might’ve been closer to the truth than he intended: like all well-executed confidence tricks, ‘Attack Of The Grey Lantern’ is initially confusing, temporarily seductive but with enough hindsight – say, 20 years of it – ultimately outed as a sham.
Also out this week in 1997:
Gene – ‘Drawn To The Deep End’. Chart peak #8
To read all the other entries in Sam’s Twenty Years Ago Today blog, click here.