Album Reviews |

Nizlopi



Make It Happen 7½ ( 2008 )
Tape Spooling / Start Beginning / I'm Alive Again / Find Me / Feel Inside / Last Night in Dakar / Drop your Guard / The One / Part of Me / Without You / England Rise Up (Feat. Benjamin Zephaniah) / Love is / Flooded Quarry / If you care about it / Lay Down

Nizlopi are listed on myspace under Folk/Acoustic/Hip-Hop. That about sums them up, actually, hard as it may be to understand. They hail from Leamington Spa, a rather nice little town not many miles at all from where I live. A local act, if you will. A local act that had an utterly unexpected UK number one single with 'JCB Song'. They have an astonishing 19034 friends on myspace, one of them being Ani Difranco. For that, I like them already. Nizlopi by the way are a two-piece band, Luke Concannon (vocals, guitar, and bodhran) and John Parker (double bass, human beatbox and backing vocals). 'JCB Song' by the way reached number one, outselling Westlife 2 to 1. For that, we are forever grateful. It was beaten to the coveted Xmas number one spot by the odious X-Factor winner that year, Shayne Ward. You can understand the bands potential problem though when follow-up to 'JCB Song' only reached the lowly position of number 91 on the singles charts, April of 2006. They deserve better than to be labelled one-hit wonders, that's for sure.

So, Nizlopi? They have a strange name. They may unfortunately end up appearing with Joe Dolce on a future compilation, but 'Start Beginning' on its own is better, for example, than James Blunt's entire career. A smart song with prominent double bass, always a nice touch. Deserves to be a hit, for my money. I haven't got any. Haven't got any money, that is, but it's always nice to discover a happy pop song that isn't dumb. The album contains fifteen songs lasting just over fifty minutes and rarely gets boring. One thing to say, i'd like to see them live. I just think their sound would light up a miserable night. Despite some hard hitting lyrics here and there, they generally seem to have a positive light surrounding them. 'Part Of Me' is a quality song, intelligent lyrics, just one of many decent tracks. They have a wealth of material you can listen to on their myspace page, so I suggest you do just that. They may not be for everybody, they have such a distinctive sound with the acoustic guitars and double bass and the vocals, that clearly, not everybody will like it. Some people like electricity, we have to accept that. For open-minded people however, check them out, get the album and report back here.

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