Search - Wedding Present :: El Rey

Not a bad showing...

bfolger | 06/27/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I have really liked the Wedding Present for about 15+ years now. Honestly, I haven't bought much of their recent stuff but wanted to check this out based on early buzz and Albini getting back into the picture. Its pretty decent for their "LA album". The themes of the songs get a little boring after awhile. Okay, I get it - Gedge is having women problems. My biggest problem is the song "Soup". I hate it. The "No Soup For You" chorus from Seinfeld totally trivializes the whole CD and starts making you analyze how bad some of the other song lyrics are. I guess in the UK the reference may go unnoticed but in the US it makes the song cheap and cartoonish. Enough with the negative, take out that song and this is totally a solid release and worth checking out. I mean, if you like The Wedding Present than you know what to expect.

[...]"

Decent but uninspired

J. Burgum | Maryland USA | 09/05/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"If you want to hear what reborn Wedding Present sounds like, get the excellent Take Fountain. If you want to hear what a post-Seamonsters Gedge/Albini collaboration sounds like, get Cinerama's outstanding finale, Torino. El Rey is Gedge's first stumble since starting Cinerama. Not terrible, it has it's moments (even bad Gedge writing is pretty good), but weak and unsatisfying. To echo another reviewer, "Soup" is unpalatable. Get out of LA, David."

Stuck in Neutral

Ikasumi | Tokyo, Japan | 11/07/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I've been a fan of TWP going all the way back to George Best. Seamonsters was a high point, so this one being recorded by Steve Albini perhaps gave me inflated hopes. But there is no new ground tread here, and little to inspire in the way the old ground is covered.



Gedge's lyrics used to be endearing, as he always seemed on the wrong end of a relationship gone bad and we could feel for him even in his bitterness. Then with Cinerama he became something of the happy womanizer and frankly hard to like (his two main themes seemed to be, "She cheated on me and it feels awful" and, "I cheated on her and it feels great," with no apparent sense of contradiction). Finally I thought perhaps he'd grown up when he gave us these lines in the lovely closer to Cinerama's last album: "I was jealous and mean, you were fragrant and flirty / It's strange just how innocent it all looks today / We tried to imagine being together at thirty / but that always seemed such a long way away." This sounded like an adult. But now he's regressed to, "And that's when I pretend that I don't have a girlfriend." Where are we now, high school? There are other embarrassing clunker lines like this, and I agree with the comment about, "No soup for you." Sheesh.



I still like them, and there are some good musical moments here, but it's very far from their best."