20YAT #22 Bentley Rhythm Ace – Bentley Rhythm Ace
UK album chart peak: #13
The album form of dance music was still being explored in the mid-90s, and consequently the idea of how it should feel remained reasonably fluid. Nonetheless, certain characteristics cropped up repeatedly: electronic long-players of the time tended to be lauded for their intensity, subversion or ecstasy, their weirdness, controversy or extremity. Seldom, however, did they play for laughs.
All of which makes Bentley Rhythm Ace’s debut something of an outlier: here was a piece of dance music that nodded to a lot of the same tropes as, say, the Chemical Brothers – acid burbles, breakbeats, obscure samples – but then topped those with comedy penny whistles, clips of belching animals stolen from vintage nature documentaries and harpsichord riffs off 1960s novelty singles.
On one level, it’s a rather charming trick in the circumstances: the resistance by BRA themselves of anything approaching seriousness holds a mirror up to their occasionally over-earnest peers, and does a good job at deflating the pomposity of a lot of contemporaneous music. Their songs also presented an excellent soundtrack for arsing about at a wedding disco, as well-paired with fizzy beer and bonhomie as any one-hit wonder. On another, though, Bentley Rhythm Ace is also a 67-minute long series of knob jokes of varying quality; despite the presence of a few genuinely witty moments, the schtick has worn thin well before Return Of The Hardcore Jumble Carbootechnodisco Roadshow, all Hanna-Barbera drum fills and car horns, arrives to round off the record.
The fact is, though, that somewhere buried deep beneath the cuckoo clock samples, GameBoy power-ups and 1950s infomercials lies a competent, heads-down, slightly dull acid house album. (That record even rears its head briefly on Ragtopskodacarchase, before Bentley Rhythm Ace squash it with another camp orchestral flurry.) That they decided not to release a tedious but sensible record is a relief, and a tribute to their self-awareness. Indeed, for all Bentley Rhythm Ace’s irritations – and they are many – it now stands as a pleasingly light-hearted aberration in a year of much sincerity; a curio that, twenty years on, sounds both dated to a specific time and also unlike pretty much any other album of the same age.
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Also out this week:
Foo Fighters – The Colour And The Shape (Roswell). Chart peak #3
Kenickie – At The Club (Emidisc). Chart peak #9
