neon neon - stainless style

As long as you take this record as less of a reinvention for Rhys and more of a flexing of his eclectic muscle, you’ll hear songs that know no bounds. ‘Steel Your Girl’ and ‘Dream Cars’ could well be off-cuts from SFA’s recent ‘Hey Venus!’, but what makes them special is producer Boom Bip’s club friendly drops and polished grooves. He resists strict generic leanings, and instead goes for miles and miles of lush finite sound. There are obvious holes, namely on tracks like ‘Raquel’ and ‘I Lust U’, that are so far from the catchy mould they mope instead of motivate, but these are saved from total write off by, ‘I Told Her On Alderaan’ and ‘Belfast’ which park themselves into a gentle John “Brat Pack” Hughes-score sort of feel. Of course in the hollow, almost playboy fashioned existence of this record’s particular influence (John DeLorean himself) fractions of ‘Stainless Steel’ leave you with dulcet images of Simon Le Bon causing affront to young ladies on a boat destined for Rio. And much the same I guess but with a more modern hip hop/crunk bent on tracks like ‘Sweat Shop’. Free to wander through timeless styles without ever having to hit hard (at 88mph?) this is a gloriously lavish and thoughtful excursion into the decade that Time forgot. Well, I say forgot, a decade that even Time itself unashamedly refers to as “a bit shit”.