The Three Pyramids Club

Album review

Three years after his 1995 solo debut achieved a surprisingly impressive showing in the British pop charts, an apparently emboldened Suggs returned with a far more ambitious sophomore effort. In sharp contrast to the underproduced demo feel of the first record, The Three Pyramids Club is lavishly overproduced, bubbling over with brass-band bluster, hip-hop beats, dizzy turntable scratching, and nutty samples. Whereas The Lone Ranger insert didn't credit a single musician, the follow-up finds the former Madness frontman backed by ten singers and 21 musicians playing 35 instruments ranging from trombone, banjo, and vibes to Theremin, shawm, and dumbek. Multi-talented producer Steve Lironi (Hanson, Black Grape) handles no fewer than 12 of those instruments, and also co-wrote most of the songs with Suggs, taking Madness chum Mike Barson's place as chief collaborator. The result is buoyantly energetic ska-pop. Early One Step Beyond-era Madness is an obvious influence, but there are also echoes of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Third Eye Blind, Robyn Hitchcock, and Oasis. It is, to be sure, a much younger sound, aimed at the largely teenaged Top 40 crowd. Lironi puts his Hanson experience to use by finding a 14-year-old boy in one of the elder statesmen of Brit-pop. On "So Tired," Suggs, seems to acknowledge his advance in years ("When I was younger I didn't need no one/Those days are long gone/But now I'm so tired"), all the while supported by inflated rock & roll power chords that make the song thoroughly marketable to teenybopper radio. The energy of the album helps to compensate for its lack of maturity, but can't quite ameliorate Suggs' regrettable predilection for cheesy female background singers and the eye-rolling stupidity of lyrics like "oh, girl, you got me in a whirl." It is a relentlessly bouncy record, lacking the balance that ballads like "Green Eyes" afforded The Lone Ranger, but it is also more consistent than the debut, and is not without variety; witness the '30s jazz-band oompah of "Our Man," the Egyptian strings of the title track, and the guest appearance by reggae rapper General Levy on "Girl." A must-have for Madness collectors, The Three Pyramids Club should also appeal to the new generation of ska fans.

© Evan Cater /TiVo