Chap / Builders Brew

Lo Recordings

The Chap, the pan-European, London-based modern pop group, are back with Builder's Brew, a collection of remixes and cover versions plus new original material.  As with their critically acclaimed recent album, Mega Breakfast, Builder's Brew continues the search for a heart of gold in a world gone cold. It deals with nice faces, bad conversations, wild joy, severe pain, moral panic, and some truly bad cycling. The Chap have expanded their repertoire and are moving into new techno territory, all the while getting with some serious choir singing and funky harmonizing.  The opener, a new edit of recent single "Proper Rock," has already enjoyed considerable airplay. But why does the song contain a very camp-sounding firefighter's choir fronting some kind of fierce sci-fi indie rock combo, demanding "Proper songs about girls and clubbing"? And what's with the scary low voice intoning "Global beats, bamboo shoot" in that fearsome house/funk/rock track, "Ethnic Instrument," remixed here by Parisian disco superstar Joakim? Never mind the cover versions of "Young and Joyful Bandit," a beautiful song from Fassbinder's last film, and the classic Chap take on Tina Turner's "What's Love Got To Do With It?" It doesn't sound much like Tina Turner but instead contains the best violin solo in the world. Fans have been asking for its release for years.  It's infectious, blistering pop music, but all the while something here is deliciously wrong. Builder's Brew is a most intriguing and exciting collection of outsider pop from one of the UK's most original bands.  "The Chap give birth to freakish Dadaist disco babies--you'll love it!" --NME   "Like Underworld if they'd decided to be a lo-fi rock and roll combo instead of a stadium selling dance act.... It is stunning." --Vice UK   "Sufficient to gather up much of what is presented to us as contemporary cutting-edge pop and render it deeply mediocre by comparison." --Guardian Guide (Track of the Week)   "It's cool and dry, and it's all over the place as well. It's sonically unpredictable and harmonically lopsided, yet almost infuriatingly catchy. It's fractured and jerky, but smoothly enticing at the same time. It's cerebral and detached in its methodology but visceral in its impact. Most of all, it's fantastic fun. Serious fun." --The Wire

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