1.Hull City Tiger (3:32) 2.98.7 (3:04) 3.The Queen's Got a Price on My Life (2:52) 4. I Mamalian (3:06) 5. Tales from the Riverbed (5:15)
A bit of an obscurity here; I don't think I'd heard it for years until I came to do this. Salako were the first English band signed to the Jeepster label, after Belle & Sebastian and Snow Patrol, and though they never matched the profile of those two bands, they were noted for their rural feel and preference for home recording. The critical - if not commercial - success of their second album Musicality in 1999 was followed by a projected series of EP releases. The first, Mappleton Sands 201298 EP, was sold only by mail-order, but this one made it to Virgin in Harrow, so I took a chance on it. It appears in a puny card sleeve, thanks to the band's stated dislike of plastic in packaging - I don't suppose they could do much about the disc itself being made of plastic.
Opener Hull City Tiger is a fairly typical example of their slightly eccentric folk-psychedelia sound. It's apparently named after a horse owned by Bob Nastanovich of Pavement - Salako were the support act on what proved to be that band's last UK tour.
I have no idea why 98.7 is so called. After a minute of analogue synthesiser doodling, an acoustic guitar emerges, introducing a fairly slight song which alludes to "moving through undergrowth". The song ends with drums fading on and off mic before it is followed by:
The Queen's Got a Price on My Life, another folk number with a cheap drum machine, but this time sung as a psudeo-round. According to their website, this song is written from the viewpoint of a worker bee who no longer produces honey and so must hide or be killed. There are lots of bees in the artwork for the Musicality album too.
More obviously experimental is I, Mamalian, which intersperses a simple keyboard vamp with bursts of guitar noise, foghorn, humming and sparse vocal interludes. Finally there's a repeated chant of "Let me see you, are you flesh?", childlike and eerie at the same time.
The last, and longest, track Tales from the Riverbed again uses repeated vocal themes ("Riverbed, tell me what you hide") and that cheap drum machine, which in all honesty is becoming a little tiresome by this point (there are also live drums on most tracks). However, the song itself is more involving, with an overlaid lead vocal bizarrely asking whether children are all messengers from Satan(!). There's maybe a trace of PJ Harvey's 'Down by the Water' too - or maybe I just think that because they rhyme "water" with "daughter". The more fleshed-out arrangement on this track recalls their better-known contemporaries, the recently disbanded Beta Band. The record ends with a sound effect of a stone (at least, I hope it's a stone!) being dropped into water.
I'm glad I pulled this CD from the depths of my shelving, but the material clearly doesn't match the quality of their first two albums. The proposed series of EPs never went beyond these two. In fact, Salako never released another record on Jeepster. They finally re-appeared earlier this year with a slightly different line-up and a new album on the Tablature label, which I've never even seen a copy of, let alone heard.
ONLINE:
Official site.
Although Jeepster don't seem to release any records any more, their Salako website is still updated. They also have a
review of this record, if you don't trust me.
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