Mozart Estate
★★★★
Tower Block In A Jam Jar
WEST MIDLANDS. CD/DL/LP
Art cult re-records vintage material with a budget.
Nick McKinlay
After last year’s Lawrence treatise Street Level Superstar (MOJO’s book of the year no less) and his giant marble bust, it’s time to get those curious onlookers buying some records. By re-recording most of 2005’s lost Go-Kart Mozart album Tearing Up The Album Chart, a memoir of mental breakdown and hard drugs? Yet therein were some golden examples of Lawrence’s synthesis of mirthful degradation and radio-ready pop-rock spangle. Now, with production cash lavished on them, the songs lustre anew. With borstal punk guitars, Supertramp-style electric piano and exaggerated Brum-cockney Lou Reed pronunciation, the brisk half hour encompasses fractured hope (Glorious Chorus), late British celeb Cilla Black (A Lorra Laughs With Cilla) and scoring smack (Donna And The Dope Fiends), but while the climactic Listening To Marmalade admits life’s grimy bleakness, the joyous Electric Rock And Roll gets back to first principles. He can’t go on, he goes on.