James: Millionaires

So there's a recurring pattern with these later James albums. This one's pretty good! This one's not as weak as I remember. And it's the same with Millionaires. Even the Boy, who likes a good song intro, looked at me conspiratorially and started bobbing his head to the beat as I Know What I'm Here For started up.

I looked up a review of Hey Ma, written by a one-time friend of mine, and realised that my comments about the naff political lyrics had been lifted more or less directly from him. Millionaires spares us the overt politics, but other parts of the Hey Ma review are still pertinent: "business as usual (expensive acoustic strumming, plumes of brass, here-comes-the-anthemic-chorus choruses)". That's the trouble with these albums: all perfectly decent, but you listen to them five or six times and feel like you've got all there is to get; no need to take them off the shelf again after that. I almost certainly would never have become a James fan, had I not witnessed them when they were up against it in the late eighties, challenged by their record company, but responding by challenging themselves. Every show was a reinvention. For the last fifteen years, you can hear them still trying to challenge themselves, trying to reinvent, but their responses to the challenge have become habitual.

My copy has a different cover, because I was gulled into getting the two-disc limited edition (disc 2 has five pretty mediocre live tracks plus two tiny Quicktime movies, from the days when a video on a CD seemed like an exciting innovation). This came on top of my multiple copies of the three singles from the album (1, 2, 3). Observations: (1) I was so rich in 1999; (2) now you can see why the record industry had such bumper sales (the highest ever?) that year; (3) never again, even if I were to win the lottery (unlikely since I haven't bought a ticket for 14 years)!

MusicBrainz entry for this album, bonus disc Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to none of this album at Last.fm

Comments

[M.J. Nicholls]

I agree mostly. This is James's blatant stab for commercial superstardom, and it works... kinda. Shame no-one was interested in them in 1999.

I still think their best work is "Stutter". It's an anarchic earache and a work of desperate genius, despite the absence rousing torchlight anthems.

[M.J. Nicholls]

absence "of" I should say...

[David]

Yep, you could be right about Stutter. I love Laid, because I'd started to go off them at the start of the nineties, and Laid felt like a comeback as a well as a step forwards. One Man Clapping could have been extraordinary, but somehow didn't capture the live James at their late eighties best.