The Vichy Government
White Elephant

White Elephant: a valuable but useless thing which costs more to keep than it earns you in status. Or: a junk sale after which keeping the unsold leftovers in storage costs you more than you earned in the first place.

Or the third Vichy Government album: a constitution-battering 60 minutes and 18 tracks of pop misanthropy; their best effort yet and a perfectly realised piece of work. The format is as one expects from The Vichy Government: bitterly intelligent and often searingly funny spoken-word lyrics dredging subject matter from the less-savoury depths of human experience and presenting the results in the style of a deadpan devil's advocate. Beneath this, sneeringly minimal keyboards and drum machine are wrapped round some fantastic pop tunes and some rather less-hummable disorienting atmospherics, an uncompromising musical format which sets the dark and flippant vocals off to perfection, matching the twisted subject matter with a stark and stripped-down setting.

This may all sound rather amusical, but... Well, for a start, a great tune is still a great tune no matter how disorienting the medium it's packaged in. White Elephant_ is crammed with melodies which get very thoroughly stuck in one's head, including many of the tracks which really do sound far too wrong to be compatible with catchiness - and yet they manage it. Which is quite an achievement, really.