By Jay Mukherjee
I realize that it is an unorthodox way to start a review by giving the background of the reviewer, but when reviewing Cornershop's new album, England is a Garden, out now via Ample Play, my background informs my love for this band. Being multi-racial/ethnic, one "hand" of my culture resides in India, while the other is in Germany, and like an international game of "Twister", my feet landed in the U.S. in the early Eighties. By the mid-Eighties, I had become a fan of indie music, specifically all things Creation Records-related, and C86. One day while working at a record store, I was putting away a shipment of vinyl and I came across an album by the Soup Dragons named Hang Ten! (1987). On the cover was a guy who looked a lot like me and my relatives! Long before I knew what the concept of "representation" meant, finding someone who looked like me and played the music I loved, hit me like a bolt of lightning.
From that moment forward I started to seek out any and all indie music with South Asians. This journey lead me to the keyboard-based electronic music of White Town, to the anarcho-electronica of the Asian Dub Foundation, to today's sophisti-pop stylings of Parekh and Singh. But the group that excited me the most over the years has been Cornershop with its "masala" of The Velvet Underground, The Rolling Stones, sitars and tablas, and an overall fusion of both East and West. (Finally, I get to use the word "masala" in a review!) Even the name of the band struck me as cool, taking head-on the stereotype of South Asians working in "cornershops" (what we'd call in the States, 7-11's).
England Is A Garden is Cornershop's first proper album since 2012's Urban Turban. The album starts out with the brilliant single "St. Marie Under Canon" with its marching beat, Felt-like organ-figure, and a drum-break right out of a single by The Go! Team. As the band states, the song is about praising St. Marie for all of our battles that she has overseen and adjudicated. A totally satisfying ear-worm. The second track, "Slingshot" slows things down with Tjinder Singh's distorted singing in Punjabi. "No Rock: Save In Roll" and "I'm A Wooden Soldier" definitely have that Rolling Stones feel to them, but to these ears, I hear similarities to Misfits-era Kinks, or even their "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman" single. "Everywhere That Wog Army Roam" has a nice old school ska feel to it, while another favorite is "Cash Money" which starts off with a familiar VU-kinda guitar riff, and would fit nicely on any album by Luna. The zenith for me is the closer, the nine-minute "The Holy Name", a song set to the poetry of a 1978 prayer by Swami Hansadutta. Its thick bass-line anchors a chorus that features what sounds like children singing at a playground: "Nothing to lose/but all to gain/You convinced the world to chant the Holy Name/Dirty hearts and dusty brains/You make the lowest men dance to the Name." It's a perfect end to an album that warms the soul, like after you've seen a friend for the first time in a long, long time.
England is a Garden is out now via Ample Play.
More details on Cornershop via the band's official website.
[Photo: Chris Almeida]