Benidorm Dream – Koudlam (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Everything about the title track of Koudlam’s sophomore album screams conflict. Musically the track juxtaposes the more ambient end of house peppered with jarring dynamics, North African rhythms and phantasmagorical vocals, as if the music of this one location, past, present and future, had been bound into a song that functioned as an acoustic history of the place. Whilst this general feeling seeps out of the track, it is the video that really delivers a more specific message.

 Benidorm Dream video

Taken from an album written from a Benidorm skyscraper, the video encapsulates the conflicts of the modern world as played out in the world below. The ultra-modernist architecture is a stark contrast to the abandoned residences left in the wake of this corporate drive. Beautiful images and people are subsumed by the freak show characters and trappings of beer swigging lad culture and all the time short cuts of bloodied boxers fighting in the ring underline the dilemma of a town which seems to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Part celebration, part wake and part warning to the pitfalls of consumerism, Koudlam continues his quest to cross genres, storm musical barricades and defy labels.