Thievery Corporation’s new album is a revolution. A revolution in CD packaging.
Certainly the most political of TC’s albums to date, a catalogue which now includes five studio albums and at least as many DJ mix CD’s, plus other assorted remix collections and EP’s, “Radio Retaliation” is good. But it’s a bit hard to get over the packaging.
The album comes in 5.5 x 5.5 inch heavy cardboard sleeve, open on two sides. Folded inside is a large 28 x 21 inch poster in place of any kind of liner notes, but don’t pull the poster out too hastily or your CD, which is folded loose inside the poster, will fall on the floor. Thievery Corporation has been into different packaging for a while, at least since “Richest Man in Babylon,” which came in a thin boxboard sleeve, packaged with a little booklet of pictures, while the all white CD was in an all white plastic case. I liked that one, but this seems a little over the top. At least “Richest” would fit in with your other CD’s on a shelf. “Radio Retaliation” and it’s cardboard box cover won’t. However, the art directors who designed it are up for a “Best Recording Package” award at the Grammys. No, I didn’t know the Grammys had a “Best Recording Package” award either.
Apparently there’s one for “Best Album Notes” too. Thievery Corporation isn’t up for that one. Fun as the poster is, the liner notes and song lyrics are scattered all across it, seemingly at random, among images of people looking strident and revolutionary-type quotes from Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Voltaire, Edward Bernays, Emiliano Kapata, William Jefferson, and more. There are more guests on this Thievery Corporation album than any other, including singers Femi Kuti, Seu Jorge, and Anoushka Shankar, along with some regular TC contributors like Sleepy Wonder, Verny Varela and “LouLou” Ooldouz Ghelichkhani, but finding the list of them on the poster isn’t easy. If you’re looking for more specific information, like who the singer was on a particular track, forget it.
Packaging aside, “Radio Retaliation” is another solid studio effort from the TC boys. The political bent gives them the chance to try out some new things, like the angry lyrics Kuti sings about African politics in the track “Vampires” (“Don’t believe politicians and thieves/They want our people on their bended knees…If you go to Malabo/What you find?/Vampires/Lies and theft/Guns and debt/Life and death/IMF) that make the somewhat standard TC backbeat and horns combo sound sort of pissed off. It’s a far cry from a lot of Thievery Corporation’s previous efforts, where coherent, serious lyrics were more the exception than the rule. TC does manage to insert a couple of their trademark chillout, dreamy groove tracks, however, none better than the album’s final cut “Sweet Tides,” featuring vocals from LouLou and the rather lovely chorus “Sweet tides, pools of love, your eyes are full of…”
It’s a good CD, wavering enough from the classic Thievery Corporation formula to encompass a few new elements, like a healthy does of global poltical awareness/discord, as opposed to the occasional George Bush hate that found it’s way into past their past offerings, and guest stars with something to say, rather than the sort of “look at me, I’m on a Thievery Corporation record, I’m down with the new musics” feel than appearances by David Byrne and Perry Farrell on their last studio album “The Cosmic Game” had. If anything, Thievery Corporation suffers from their own success; they’ve incorporated many worldbeat elements into their electronic music production so well that they seem natural to do now, and appear on a new Thievery Corporation album like clockwork. After really being the pioneers of good American chillout music for so long, they’ve found a niche and are sticking to it, and as a result some of their stuff is starting to sound a bit the same.
4/5. It’s definitely Thievery Corporation. What’s more, it’s good Thievery Corporation, even if the sound is not exactly a revolution for Thievery Corporation. Unless you’re going to put the album notes poster on your wall the packaging gets kind of irritating real fast and you might drop the CD on the floor a few times when you take the folded up poster out of the cardboard sleeve. But hey, you might have a Grammy award winning CD package in your hands, so there’s that.
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