Rockbites: Death By Chocolate by Death By Chocolate

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January 2001 • Rockbites Alternative Daily

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Death By Chocolate by Death By Chocolate
22 January 2001

Harking back to storybook psychedelic rock records from the ’60s and ’70s such as Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake by The Small Faces, Mr. Mick by Stackridge, and Forever Changes by Love—back to the days when people understood the album format as a single framed piece—the new eponymous debut from Death By Chocolate glues its 12 songs together with interposed poetic soliloquies themed on colors: mustard yellow, sky blue, orange, olive, and red. These bits are spoken by enchanting teenage vocalist Angela Faye Tillet, leader of DBC.
    As for the songs, they manage to be as musically interesting as they are simple and lighthearted. For example, over a bed of snare, tremelo guitar, Farfisa organ, and simplistic electric bass, Tillet tells us “My friend Jack eats sugar lumps. Sugar man hasn’t got a care. He’s been traveling everywhere!” Listening to her extremely danceable Ice Cold Lemonade you can’t help but picture colored strobes, heavy makeup, long, long hair, and shimmering visual trails. The overall effect is gentle, fresh, disarming, fun, and ultimately very satisfying. But not so satisfying that we don’t want a lot more.
    Death By Chocolate are Tillet along with producers Jeremy Butler and John Austin. Tillet, a chambermaid from Clacton-On-Sea (on the east coast of England), traveled west to record the album at Terminal Electric Works in Bristol. But the new record is not the trio’s first collaboration. They put out a mostly-covers LP titled Junior Electric Magazine last year under the banner Lollipop Train, for Spanish label Siesta. That album includes a preschool-friendly version of the Frank Zappa & The Mothers Of Invention song Wowie Zowie, tracks by The Monochrome Set and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, and songs by The Monkees. Can you say 'eclectic'?
    On the new album most of the tracks are original, with Tillet sharing songwriting credits with Butler and Austin. They also include the theme from The Flying Nun, the Cat Stevens song If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out from the film Harold And Maude, and the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore ditty The L.S. Bumblebee.
    Death By Chocolate is simultaneously a head spinning timewarp and one of the most original pop records in years. Five bites out of five. | Death By Chocolate on Jetset | | The Land Of Chocolate (MP3 clip) | | Siesta Records | | CD | | top of page |

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