JUJU REMASTER - ADVERTS/REVIEWS | ||
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Music Week 24/04/79 | ||
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Polydor reissue possibly the best two albums from the Banshees canon in Kaleidoscope and Juju. Though Join Hands was a remarkable testament to the band's originality and vision, it was after John McGeoch (Magazine, PiL) and Budgie (The Slits) joined the band that content achieved parity with style. Kaleidoscope features classic cuts such as Happy House and Christine, while Juju represented a sea change in structure and lyrical reference. Playing these albums today is more than a stroll down memory lane, illustrating how musical genius retains an urgency and relevance decades later. | ||
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Mojo 07/06 | ||
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Banshees albums
three and four, remastered with bonus tracks.
After 1979's joyless Join Hands (also reissued in this latest cache of Banshee retrospection) somewhat dulled appetites for further helpings of Siouxsie's monochrome anguish, the Banshees regrouped to effect a Technicolour renaissance. Kaleidoscope (1980) was the first Banshees album to feature John McGeoch, though the raft of demos here confirm the shift away from clinical doom towards spacier psychedelic textures was down to the songwriting core of Sioux and Severin. Happy House and Christine retain their frisson, but it's the minimalist electro daubs of Tenant and Red Light that best withstand posterity's gaze. Hindsight suggests it was the recruitment of Budgie and his tribal powerhousing drums that really transformed the band: duly road-hardened, they delivered a near-masterpiece in Juju (1981). The sheer muscular passion of the performances lent credibility to Sioux's increasingly lurid lyrical fantasmagoria - Daphne du Maurier goes S&M - and the Banshees were never more powerful than astride the mighty rock groove of Monitor or amidst Head Cut's curdled horror show. Kaleidoscope 4/5 Keith Cameron |
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