Get Back Guinozzi! – Carpet Madness

French/British 5-piece Get Back Guinozzi!, based around the creative core of duo Eglantine Gouzy and Fred Landini are every bit as quirky and off-the-wall as the names that they have chosen for their band and album might suggest.This is perhaps partially thanks to the method by which the pair have collaborated. Many of these songs were apparently written by being exchanged back and forth by the power of the internet between the London-based Gouzy and Landini (who wrote many of the melodies, initially as instrumental tracks) in France. So, a lot of the time, the end products do indeed suffer from a lack of focus, sounding piecemeal and lacking in one overall “authorial voice”. Opener ‘Where Are You’ starts strongly, but then rather loses impetus, and meanders its way to a close, a problem with several of the songs here.Another barrier to unfettered enjoyment is the weird intonation with which the vocal delivery is peppered. Gouzy’s singing voice is pure and at times sweet, but many is the time that the already obscure meaning of her lyrics are rendered still more incomprehensible by the insertion of an unexpectedly stressed word or syllable (“I tried to fig-ure it out” from ‘Where Are You’, “tiny cre-a-ture” in ‘Personal Lodger’, and least-forgivably the flat-out mispronunciation of “ammunition” as “ammun-ay-tion” in their cover of ‘Police and Thieves’).Many songs have a quality of naivety that can, nonetheless, charm. ‘Go Back To School’, the single ‘Low Files Tropical’, ‘L.A.’, ‘Jungley’, and ‘Sick’ all feature some kind of sing-song-ish or nursery rhyme qualities that are quite cute, although such is the extent of their ‘childish’ nature that it actually comes as a bit of a jolt when you hear the f-bomb dropped in the middle of ‘Sick’ (“Don’t get mixed up / I am fucked up”).Lyrically  it is quite hard to decode much of what is being sung about. The closest I got to uncovering anything coherent was the fact that “jungles” appear to be a key concern ”“ witness the track ‘Jungly’, but also jungle-related concerns in the two following tracks ‘Sick’ and ‘King’s Song’ (“jungly sound”). Musically, much strummed acoustic guitar is used, juxtaposed (sometimes successfully, sometimes more jarringly) with the kind of “ooh look, we’ve got an new effects box ”“ let’s see what noises it can make” synthesized sounds (see in particular ‘Sick’). Over the course of the whole album the cumulative effect is of a breezy, summery, rather jolly and upbeat nature.The aforementioned ‘Police and Thieves’ cover is one of the most enjoyable tracks here, firstly because unlike a lot of what precedes it on the album it is possessed of a coherent tune and words, and secondly it succeeds in being sufficiently different to both the original and the more famous previous cover version. As for the rest, well, it is pretty hard to out-and-out dislike this band and their music. Quirky, cute, naïve, ephemeral and a little confusing, yes, but I suspect that with a little more focus, perhaps closer production or stricter editing, then they may, in time, produce something of more real and lasting worth.Get Back Guinozzi! on Myspace