Release Date: May 1, 2012
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Alternative Pop/Rock, Indie Rock, Post-Rock
Record label: Fire Records
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Bobby Conn has been playing pick 'n' mix with genres and delivering messages of politics, hope, despair, revolution and bullshit in his quasi-falsetto since the early Nineties. All this whilst dressed in glitter, eyeliner and high heels that would these days rival Nicky Wire. Macaroni continues this delightful life’s work with Bobby’s usual panache and evangelical revolutionary fervour.
Longtime Chicago showman Bobby Conn has always held theatrics in as high a regard (if not higher) than musicianship. Whether claiming himself the anti-Christ, propagating the ridiculously convoluted "Continuous Ca$h Flow System," or lampooning George Bush and Tom Cruise with equal vigor, Conn has relied on high concept, fabrication, and over-the-top absurdity since his beginnings. With his sixth studio album Macaroni, Conn revisits some of the social commentary of his Bush administration-era album The Homeland, this time addressing the Occupy Wallstreet movement while at the same time offering a scathing critique of many of its hipster minions' lifestyles.
Once claiming to be the Antichrist during a bout of laudably vigorous self-promotion, Chicago’s Bobby Conn has never shied away from a grand statement given the opportunity. Though if you’re taking from that the image of some sort of glam-metal, Marilyn Manson-style gothic abrasion, you’d be disappointed/relieved to be way off the mark. ‘Macaroni’ is a gloopy cheese-feast of sprightly psychedelic pop, served with a dollop of wanton James Brown funk on the side.
Chicago’s enigmatic rock n roll showman Bobby Conn is certainly an artist that has a lot to say. Over the course of his five studio albums he’s established himself as one of rock and pop’s more interesting characters and all his flamboyance and magnetic personality, aligned to some scathing lyrics comes across wonderfully on his sixth full-length, and first since 2007’s ‘King For A Day’, ‘Macaroni’Conn is an artist whom it is almost impossible to pin down, he perpetually flits between styles and sounds but it is this restless nature that gives his music an engaging quality, as you never quite know what you are going to get. In keeping with his previous work, this is an album that frequently confounds.
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