HAPPY FAMILY

Happy Family's first album finds the four man set of Morimoto, Myano, Makino and Nagase jamming their little zeuhlish hearts out to produce intricate instrumentals of tangled-up RIO- flavoured music. The technical accomplishment and the sheer complexity on show is impressive, although personally I find that the album begins to suffer from a lack of variation in emotional tone or atmosphere - at plenty of points the band seem to be playing for playing's sake. There are, of course, plenty of people who find that to be more than enough - and such folk will probably dig this album a lot - but for me music needs some context, whether it's an emotion or a mood or a tone or an atmosphere or an idea or a story it wants to convey, in order to avoid degenerating into aimless noodling.