Search - Luke Haines :: Oliver Twist Manifesto

The Bitterest Man in London

Michael Kulikowski | Knoxville, TN | 08/15/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Crankier than Mark E. Smith, more vindictive than Morrissey, Luke Haines is the black cloud inside Britpop's silver lining. Given that he peaked with After Murder Park five years ago, Haines has still managed to produce a startlingly good body of work in the Baader Meihof and Black Box Recorder records of the more recent past.The present disk is an improvement on the last Auteurs album, though it never reaches as high as the giddy, tongue-in-cheek single The Rubettes. Instead, what we get is a number of nasty little songs aimed at pop culture in general and the trend-setters of London's club scene in particular. A couple of tracks, and a number of the recurrent musical motifs, are repeated from the soundtrack to Christie Malry's Own Double Entry. Haines' ability to sprinkle his rather basic melodies with half-subliminal Hammer Horror sound effects and strings has grown over the years, though his deployment of the most basic drum machine tracks annoys. Still, the title track, Christ, and the Spook Manifesto rank with the best of the man's work. Worth getting it before it's deleted -- which won't take long given the determinedly unfashionable quality of everything Haines does."