Handcream For A Generation

Depending on your point of view, this frustrating album is either an amusingly disjointed flying-visit traipse through the usual bustling, omni-cultural Cornershop tour of central London and points east, or a disappointing collection of great ideas brought about seventy percent of the way to satisfying fruition and then, perversely, left there.

If you expected a cohesive album from a highly original band at the peak of their powers, financially bolstered by the runaway success of the Fatboy Slim remix of ‘Brimful of Asha’ in 1998, then what you actually get is a collection of good but unmemorable tracks – Bollywood dub, big beat, joke disco. On the plus side, several singularly Cornershopish qualities, due to which they’ve rendered themselves indispensable to the modern pop canon, are still present and correct.

The gleeful swizzing of non-white pop traditions with pleasantly stoned guitar rock? Check. The easy, friendly grooves – muscular enough to give the whole album an agreeably irresistible forward motion, but gentle enough so you can roll a funny ciggie and lick it closed as you boogie without spilling any tobacco? Check. And last but not least, whole songs devised around two-note vocal melodies – delivered in Tjinder Singh’s warm, slightly exhausted-sounding deadpan – that slide straight into your bloodstream, simple and perfect and profound as mantras? Check, mate.

And there are two more classics for the ‘Shop to rack up next to ‘Asha’, ‘Sleep On The Left Side’ and ‘Jullandar Shere’. First single ‘Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III’ – grinding T-Rex guitars; saucy, profoundly up-for-it female backing singers; the smell of summer in its hair, an al-fresco rock-festival shag on the agenda – is a glorious swipe at crap rock music (or, as Singh’s memorable chorus has it, “overgrown super shit”). It’s a bolshy companion piece to the sweet vinyl nostalgia of ‘Asha’, and is the first great single of the summer of ‘02.

And while we don’t get anything approaching the placid buoyancy of ‘Jullandar Shere’, we do get its extroverted inverse, ‘Spectral Mornings’: a majestic, monolithic, 15-minute-long LSD sunrise of kit drums, sitar, percussion and Noel Gallagher’s blazing guitars (fulfilling those Beatlesian maharishi fantasies no doubt, and sounding great, incidentally). So that’s two more whopping great pop things than we’ve heard elsewhere so far this year.

So they’ve come a long way, baby – but they’ve still a ways to go. Never mind though: with Cornershop, getting there has always been half the fun.