SPRATLEYS JAPS - "PONY"; "...Inexplicable off the wall charm and unorthodox prettiness... Inconsistent and unrestrained... Spratleys Japs are firing off whatever wayward sparks are coming to them..."
This here is the very fine and the very first album from this very curious new outfit, written, produced and featuring Cardiacs' Tim Smith. All My Eye are also proud and honoured to boast such an unprecedented recording as their first offering in our year 2001.
This "Pony" is all reinvented pop, as furiously clattering as it is dreamy, distant and under-the-water. It is... "sparking, hissing wiring going off all over the shop, all held together with gaffer tape... set against bursts of epic orchestration and banks of tiny voices struggling with shipping forecast interference..." We just don't know what else to say. Except that only a fool should deny a "Pony" grateful entrance into their houses, beckoned in with outstretched, eager arms, with that secure, rare feeling that everything, at long last, makes super-sense.
RICH PICKIN'S!!! 10/10

Tracks: BURNT VESSEL FANNY PONY SPARROWS VINE OH FEAR HAZEL CABINET POND DON'T YOU AIL, FLASH THE SEA TO STEAM

SPRATLEYS JAPS - "HAZEL"; This is the single taken from the debut album "Pony" including two songs exclusive only to this release and an "episode" which we can only excuse as a lack of restraint and discipline on behalf of one of the band. Apart from that we have the magnificent "Hazel". She swells with soaring orchestral Phil Spectre-esque swathes, only to be all at once possessed by a real-life spectre sucking your full stereo into a tiny wooden wireless, it's straining, broken little voice floundering out from the tangle of a haunted hedgerow, when suddenly "Curfew" ...(breathe in)... pulls you wretched out of the brambles into grim daylight with it's clattery intro only to share with us it's impassioned tale of a woman clinging to a bell, deadening the toll of the curfew which was to mark the time of her husband's ruin by execution. Don't even ask about the inexplicable hide-under-the-table privacy of the lilting "Secret".

Tracks: HAZEL CURFEW HOME SECRET