GONZALES

GONZALES
SOFT POWER (2008)
320 KBPS

This is Gonzales' tribute to great and beautiful soft rock records of the seventies and eighties. You know. That shit you're supposed to call a "guilty pleasure" because you're a fuckwit whose musical taste is dictated by joyless hacks, soulless dried husks of former white people who can't enjoy Bon Jovi records without doing it ironically. Gonzales' music shits down the throats of these Nazis. It always did. It is one of his superpowers.
Gonzales is too clever for a lot of people's tastes (English people detest intelligence, and can't stomach wit in music unless it is clearly labelled "musical comedy"). But on Soft Power, the One Eyed Jew dispenses with the Gonzoid barbs and goes straight to, and from, the heart. So we get songs like 'Slow Down' - sublime, chest-beating power-balladry, shamelessly dripping with virgin pianos and sax solos, bells and handclaps surging towards two (2) key changes. 'Map Of The World', 10CC doing ELO covers, lush mulittracked vocals floating along on a sea of record crackles. 'Apology' - a dark, simmering cauldron of bitterness, shot through with a stalactite of ketamine bass and made fragile and beautiful by keys that sound like shards of glass, topped with Gonzales' most affecting vocal performance EVER. Dot com. It is a song that kicks you in the balls with a pointed shoe. It physically affects the listener foolish enough to let it fully penetrate his consciousness. It should come with a warning sticker.
We get the Sesame Street stomp of lead single 'Working Together'. We get the pure disco swirl of 'Let's Ride'. But best of all, we get 'Singing Something'. Gonzo a capella, "harmonising with the walls" because he likes the echo in the room, before a piano straight out of a silent movie turns our goosebumps into chills, and a lump forms magically in the listener's throat. We're right in there, bang in the middle of the music with its composer. Then suddenly, cruelly, this great, brave, magical album stops, and we are abandoned by Gonzales once more!

1. Working Together
2. Slow Down
3. Theme From In Between
4. Unrequited Love
5. Map Of The World
6. Modalisa
7. Apology
8. Let'S Ride
9. C Major
10. Singing Something
Bonus Tracks
11. Fortunately, Unfortunately
12. Slow Down Remix
13. Home Movies