From a Stroke of Genius to rethinking Paul McCartney's records with Twin Freaks, now we get a real picture of Roy Kerr's The Freelance Hellraiser with this.
The Freelance Hellraiser makes some pretty cool feel-good music, his tunes are bubbling with summer soundscapes, they're like a load of globules of water coming together to form a wonderful waterfall through which the sun' rays will filter into a spectrum of rainbow colours, like a load of atoms slowing meeting to form a whole.
His singing voice is very much like that of Gary Lightbody's and the songs range from his classic mash-up style on 'Can't Hide' to sounding like U2 on acid with 'We Don't Belong'. It's an incredibly diverse record, as you would have come to expect from a man who made his fame by mixing The Strokes' 'Hard To Explain' with Christina Aguilera's 'Genie In A Bottle' ('Stroke of Genius'), then going on to do prolific remixes for the likes of Placebo, Richard Ashcroft, Christina Aguilera and Editors, and ending up becoming Sir Paul McCartney's official tour DJ and the first person ever to have free reign remixing Macca's back catalogue, under the name Twin Freaks.
So this record of his own songs comes with a high anticipation and it meets expectations, if not for being what we've come to expect, then as exceeding whatever we could imagine this opus actually turning out like. It's grand in structure and encompasses all kinds of musicianship, from sweet and subtle piano songs, 'The Sweetest Noise', to wanton indie dance-rock, 'You Can Cry All You Want', on which he sounds like a Gallagher, evoking memories of The Chemical Brothers' brilliant 'Setting Sun'.
The forms and ideas displayed on this album are very much in keeping with the current trends of dance, which The Freelance Hellraiser played a big part in the setting-up of; it sits nicely alongside Gnarls Barkley's 'St. Elsewhere' and compliments the chilled out merger of genres like rap, indie and electronica well.
It is a time of converging technologies and because of this music is converging too, pioneering this is a collective of groups and artists like The Freelance Hellraiser; his album is just music in its purest form, defying definition, borrowing from all sorts of resources and pooling them to create a near-hour of tantalising sounds that hit your memory at speed and get lodged there for good. It may not be as exciting as the Twin Freaks LP was, but that was an extraordinary accomplishment, 'Waiting For Clearance' however is a great example of what Roy Kerr himself can produce, it shows his talent for song writing and delivers eleven tunes that provide a good accompaniment to your day. Simple as that.