Happy Mondays - Bummed
NME.COM feature on Happy Mondays - Bummed album including album review, artwork, tracks, listen now, tour dates, discography and more.
Album Review
Release date: 04 September 2006
Happy Mondays: 'Bummed (Collectors’ Edition)'
'The world had never heard anything like it'
Despite its historical status as lesser sibling to 1990’s ‘Pills’N’Thrills And Bellyaches’, ’88s ‘Bummed’ has actually dated best of all the Mondays’ albums. Martin Hannett’s raw production shows the Madchester sound in its infancy; post-punk squall is squeezed next to acid-house expulsions, while Shaun Ryder’s laconic drawl (here at its most demonically accusatory) is...
Tracklisting click track to read more
- Country Song
- Moving In With
- Mad Cyril
- Fat Lady Wrestlers
- Performance
- Brain Dead
- Wrote For Luck
- Bring A Friend
- Do It Better
- Lazyitis
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But this is a flailing, half-arsed dog's breakfast, [B]Shaun[/B]'s autopilot vocals clipping the treetops of his own boredom threshold, as if on the 53rd take when he finally had to remember the words
Happy Mondays Tickets
| Date / Time | Artist | Venue | Town/City | Seetickets | Viagogo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 29, 2012 11:00 | Happy Mondays | Lulworth Castle | Lulworth |
Buy Happy Mondays Tickets |
Happy Mondays - Bummed YouTube Videos
![Factory/Happy Mondays ITV Schools doc 1988 [1/2]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4S1AbjIlDZA/0.jpg)
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Happy Mondays - Bummed: Wikipedia Album Entry
Artist: Happy Mondays
Album: Bummed
Release Date: Nov 1988
Format: CD Deluxe Edition
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Only a year after the intermittently thrilling Squirrel & G-Man, Happy Mondays snapped into focus on its sophomore album, 1988's Bummed. "Focus" is an odd word for the persistently addled, violently hedonistic Mondays, yet Bummed has its own peculiar drug logic, loping into view with the two-stepping "Country Song," a cut so twisted it goes far beyond irony, then settling into the dense groove of "Moving in With," its hook buzzing and circling, causing a cacophony. Such vivid, concrete textures are a hallmark of producer Martin Hannett, the Mancunian legend who has been brought on board to give the Happy Mondays direction by doing the opposite of what he did with Joy Division. His production for Unknown Pleasures was stark, austere, but Bummed is all smeared colors and harsh edges, a fistful of razors and menace cutting viciously into the subconscious. This is nasty, nightmarish music delivered with a lascivious leer by Shaun Ryder, a hallucinatory accidental poet portrayed on the album's garish cover as some kind of harlot put out to pasture. Decadence has rarely sounded as dangerous as it did in the hands of the Mondays and this is where they reveled in that debauchery, pumping out stiff psychedelic funk as Ryder spat out rhymes of luck, lazyitis and fat lady wrestlers. Hannett's bright, brittle production amplifies everything, creating a swirling hyper-reality that's almost a sonic black hole sucking everything into its vortex — slide guitars, sound clips from "Performance," maniacally looped drum machines, Beatles melodies, drums that are pushed to the front of the mix so it all is a relentless assault, from the ears down to the loins. As jagged and lacerating as all this is, there's a sense of evil glee, that the Mondays want to drag you down to their level, but there's no sense of seduction here; you're either with them or not, as Bummed is music for after you've already succumbed to the dark side.
[In the year following Bummed, the Happy Mondays began honing their seduction techniques, reducing the brittle blare of Bummed and ramping up the acid house beats that fuelled baggy, beginning the seminal Madchester, Rave On EP in 1989, added to Rhino UK's double-disc 2007 Deluxe Edition of Bummed as one of the wealth of bonus tracks. Madchester was such a pivotal part of the baggy movement that the term "madchester" became interchangeable with baggy, and arriving here after the proper album, it's easy to hear how the group started to slightly soften their stance and expand their base, primarily on beats that didn't feel like a brutal mugging. This is all apparent on the second disc of the Deluxe Edition, which rounds up various edits and mixes of "Wrote for Luck," "Hallelujah" (the pivot point on Madchester, Rave On) and "Lazyitis," all mining turning the original dance-oriented Hannett productions into something that was actually danceable. These are all valuable, as is the EP and B-sides that fill out the first disc, and they help act as the bridge between Bummed and the psychedelic kaleidoscope of Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches].
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