Warning! Lazy journalistic hook device imminent. Considering that Charlie Christmas used to cover the four string duties in grunge alt-rock stalwarts Urge Overkill, Happy Day sees him in a much more mercurial and reflective mood. (Did you spot it?) But who says that leopards can’t change their spots? In fact the very survival of music relies on regular spot-changing episodes.
Anyway, Happy Day is a wonderful blend of blissed out Zappa strangeness and Brian Wilson’s most off kilter musical machinations, a mix of pastoral pop, indie oddness and dream-like psychedelia, washed out and wistful. A strange brew if ever there was one but a remarkably potent one at that. Laid back to the point of being horizontal, Happy Day is a song which oozes rather than grooves, drifts more than drives but still finds a way to get lodged in the brain, probably filed in the cranial archives between distant memories of Beach Boys B-sides and half-remembered Magical Mystery Tour incidental music.
In short, wonderfully weird, but weird is the way forward, we all know that.
