It's Great When You're Straight...Yeah

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Heavily steeped in the funk, ex-Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder comes off here like a Mancunian George Clinton as he babbles over top of a skilled, polyrhythmic unit that's far tighter than the slapdash Mondays. --Jeff Bateman --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Tracks:

Reverend Black Grape
In The Name Of The Father
Tramazi Parti
Kelly's Heroes
Yeah Yeah Brother
A Big Day In The North
Shake Well Before Opening
Submarine
Shake Your Money
Little Bob

Amazon.com

Heavily steeped in the funk, ex-Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder comes off here like a Mancunian George Clinton as he babbles over top of a skilled, polyrhythmic unit that's far tighter than the slapdash Mondays. --Jeff Bateman

Customer Reviews:

Madcap poetry happily married to frenzied rock.......2007-06-01

It's Great When You're Straight...Yeah, sounds like a musical melting pot, pulsating with snappy, funky energy that sounds best played loudly. Trying to pigeonhole this music by genre and style must have been a nightmare for the robotic program directors who rule radio--not that the heavily potty-mouthed lyrics would be considered radio friendly to begin with.

Shaun Ryder assembled a great band for this Black Grape session and the collective risk-taking yielded one of the more memorable recordings from a time when the doldrums seemed to have music in a headlock. Don't expect a straightforward experience trying to detangle the lyrics which are chock full of references to cultural icons, religion, politics, and drug culture: this is madcap poetry happily married to frenzied rock.

Black Grape where are you?.......2005-08-14

You know I had this CD back in '96.I loved it.I played in a bar I worked at and every body always asked me."Who is this"?.Then along with my other favorite CDs they got stolen.I miss these guys.Back then they were supposed to tour the U.S but some of the band members had problems getting visas due to some "records" of the other sort.I bet if they had they would've won over a whole new continent.What happened to them? What are they doing now?Wish they kept at it.Kinda a forerunner of the Gorillaz,or the Dub Pistols,huh?

Groovy Train.......2003-06-12

Hadn't heard this for a long time, till I picked it up in a used CD bin for a buck. Wow this record has aged well, great grooves splashed with dancehall, reggae and more. And with Ryder's unmistakeable vocals layered on top of everything...get on this groovy train, you don't need a ticket...

Stop being a menace.......2000-12-13

Pretty much a Happy Mondays continuation, but less frantic. 'Straight' was a big hit in the UK, and is a surprisingly successful album, mixing bizarre stream-of-consciousness narration with indie beats, a bit like The Fall but happier. It came out at the heigh of britpop and helped soundtrack the summer of '95, with 'Reverend Black Grape', 'In the Name of the Father' and 'Kellys Heroes' getting masses of airplay on the briefly funkified Radio One. They're all fun singles - lots of beats and guitars and samples with Shaun Ryder over the top and Bez probably dancing somewhere in the studio - and the rest of the album is just as well-crafted. 'A big day in the north' is an atmospheric sort-of-ballad, 'Tramazi Party' is a shout-along terrace-anthem that never was, and it peters out towards the end but is still good fun.

It shouldn't really work, but it does - Ryder can't sing in a conventional sense, he has a vocal range of one wobbly semitone, but his semi-rapping, semi-whining voice is amazingly soulful, and whilst dancer and hanger-on Bez doesn't even appear on the record his vibe seem to exude forth from the speakers. The production is deviously clever, putting the above into a professional framework, and it's basically the Happy Mondays, but more modern.

Best of all, 'Kelly's Heroes' contains the all-time classic lyric 'Jesus was a black man, no, Jesus was Batman, no no no - that was Bruce Wayne!'. And a completely incomprehensible chorus.

Simply superb.......2000-07-10

'Its great...' is a stupendously good album that swaggers jauntily out of your stereo and infests your house with a sleazy, addled vibe. Like all things nasty, you know its not really good for you but you just can't help reaching for the volume control. Number eleven is the setting of choice.

Its as if the Happy Mondays had never split up only the music is slicker and more precise and provides a marvellous backdrop for the wailing, pestering rhyming of Shaun Ryder's nonsense lyrics, undercut with a velvety delivery provided by Kermit. The album fuses heavy beats with a large dollop of funk, wailing guitars and throbbing baselines and, there is no other way of putting this, positively oozes out of your speakers.

The closest reference point is Pills, Thrills & Bellyaches by the Happy Mondays but 'Its great...' takes the next step with a crafted and polished version of the Mondays mayhem that is all the more amazing for Ryder's long absence from any recording studio.

Don't hesitate one second more - this one is worth your hard earned cash.

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