Flipron - Hanging Round The Lean-to With Grandad (Tinydog)
UK release date: 22 May 2006
Flipron are one of those bands that I cannot believe are not blasting out of radios and appearing on Top Of The Pops and Popworld. Heaven knows the whole music scene would be a much brighter and interesting place if they were. Flipron deal in an odd and peculiarly English style of song writing. The tales they tell, the yarns they spin, draw from the same dirty old river as The Kinks, Madness and the tender reflections of Pulp, as English as weak tea, test match cricket and bank holiday drizzle.
Handing Round the Lean-to with Grandad has pared back their abnormal audio racket in a favour of a mandolin and banjo backing. Imagine Ray Davies fronting Out of Time era REM and you capture a little of how special this is. Songs dealing with old age can so easily slip into sticky sweet over sentimentality. That's not what happens here. No, Jesse Budd regales us with a compassionate portrait of his ageing Grandad and reflections on his passing away.
The Electric Whispering Ghost vamps up the bands sound. The fairground organ and theremin whistling paint a hammer house of horrors soundtrack performed by the Grange Hill house band. The closing A Flipron Theme starts like that spooky music from Tales Of The Unexpected before morphing into a demented pedal steel surf tune. Let Flipron provide the soundtrack to your day and it will be one filled with wonder, horror and surprise.
