A request from veteran songwriter Paul McCartney to sample only his at-the-time new album, Off the Ground, spawned a fascinating project. He is right in his reasoning for not wanting straightforward adaptations of his work. They do often feature a James Brown sample. There are few who can sample as well, and source it as strongly, as Daft Punk. Youth was one of those greats, and it shows on their McCartney collaboration, The Fireman. Their Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest recording is a staggering, well-realised project which plays to the strength of sampling. What can you do with the sounds of one album? You can change the form, the very meaning of the songs, by shifting notes and sampling from other tracks. The Fireman project is a massive success because, like all the best McCartney albums, the Let It Be hitmaker has been challenged. It happened twelve years later on Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, and it happens when Youth dare to sample Back to the Egg.
Giving Off the Ground a techno spin is thrilling. It’s a concept anyone could speak into existence, but to put it together takes a rare musician. Martin Glover, better known as Youth, is not the man for it. Bold it may be to think Off the Ground needs pulling into the acid clubhouse tinge of popular music at the time, but it’s a different appeal when it’s nearly eighty minutes of the same beat. Such is the point of trance, but the minor variances and additional sounds which comprise the best of evolving trance beats are lacking. The trouble for Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest is once you realise the overlap from song to song, the lack of variance even in those little notes of wonder, it’s impossible to piece the dream back together. Sampling only works when you can tell the major differences, and while Youth does well with the work at hand, the slow tempo and similar sound from song to song is a numbing experience.
Once you hear that sole trick at play, Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest loses its charm. The trouble is not in the consistency of a beat from song to song, but how each track feels like a replication of the first. Pure Trance has an identical start to the tracks preceding it, and this feels like a shortcoming Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest simply forgets to overcome. It’s a game of finding out how long you can last with eighty minutes of minor changes to vastly similar material. There is only so much you can do with sampling from one album, but there are a few extra pieces from Wings’ catalogue thrown in there. The Fireman debut becomes a game of spotting the track rather than a concept worth listening to on its own merit.
McCartney remains relentless in the spirited pursuit of anything new in music. Not everything will be great on this search, but they are usually interesting. Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest is a more interesting concept than it is an active listening experience. Too slow to be techno, too similar from song to song to be an ambient work. All that differentiates the songs is their title. You could shuffle those names and few, if anyone, would pick out the difference. They are each unique in the mood they offer, the tone which comes through, but there is very little in the way of variation. Little snippets of interest but never enough to bring about real change or fiery differences on Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest. A lacking album with a brilliant premise. It’s nothing special. Happens all the time.
