Chumbawamba - Discography reviews
If you've been following the monthly music catch-ups - or you're paying attention to my music review site (there's an RSS feed!) - you'll know that for the past several months I've been reviewing the Chumbawamba discography. Which, as of this week, is now completed as far as I can take it right now (I'm missing the live albums and some CD singles so might make retrospective updates one day).
You can find all the reviews here.
I've been a fan of Chumbawamba since my early teens, and it wasn't actually through "Tubthumping" as you might think. Instead, 1994's Anarchy was one of the countless random albums that my sister's then-boyfriend in the early 2000s would hand over to me in form of burned CD-Rs full of pirated mp3s (I have so much to thank him for, in terms of exposing me to both music and games) and it was love at first listen. This was despite the fact that I was a naïve, foreign kid who couldn't understand any of the nuance in the lyrics, any of the deeper meanings and certainly none of the politics. But the music spoke to me, and it started a love affair that lead them to be one of the defining bands of my early music nerd years.
I chose to do this discography run-through because it's been a long while since I had last properly listened to some of the band's earlier albums, together with the realisation that I hadn't really given some of the later albums an equal time of day. In fact, most of the time my decisions on who to pick for these projects boils down to randomly listening to an album I haven't heard in a while and becoming inspired to binge it all again. It was a very rewarding journey for a number of reasons. For one, going through it all from start to finish makes the final folk years seem like a perfectly natural pivot - there were hints from the very beginning that they were always going to end up like this. Second, going through the lyrics and the in-depth annotations for each song that the band always included in the liner notes (I really love this aspect about them!) properly after so long really opened some of these songs for me, now that I can actually understand the context and the topics properly. It's been particularly wonderful to realise just how often Chumbawamba were singing about LGBT rights and pushing back on homophobia from day one, beyond the obvious songs (like the one literally titled "Homophobia").
But it also made some of these albums click a little more in place. WYSIWYG (2000) solidified itself as one of their very greats during this revisit; similarly, A Singsong and a Scrap (2005) has proven just what a strong entry it is into their back catalogue. In both cases, I didn't really want the "cycle" to end as I kept wanting to listen to the albums more. The band's last album, 2010's ABCDFEG, had also previously fallen a bit through the cracks for me and now I took the opportunity to spend a lot more focused time on it, and it was a lot stronger than my memory lead me to believe. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I remembered 2008's The Boy Bands Have Won more fondly than how I felt now that I was revisiting it.
Overall - what a fantastic, one of a kind band with such a rich adventure of a discography. They've got such a fantastic story and each chapter of it is graced with an album that's always wildly different from the one before. Behind their one-hit-wonder status is a true treasure chest of music, and I can't recommend them more than enough.
This post was mainly just to "advertise" the reviews but I'll finish this with linking to some of my favourite songs of their across the years.