Cornershop

Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast

Ample Play Records

Released April 20, 2010

Score: C +

Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast is nothing like Cornershop’s ’93 album Elvis Sex-Change. It might be something like Woman’s Gotta Have It from ’95. But it wasn’t really until When I Was Born for the 7th Time (’97) and Handcream for a Generation (’02) that Cornershop settled into what has become “”their sound”” — and the fact that they did settle into one comes as a mild disappointment. The fluctuation of tune and tempo so copiously offered before is barely evident this time around. Kind of like playing with a paint splatter machine using a set of 562 colors, each picture comes out more colorful than the next, but when you lay them all out, you can’t really tell one from the other.

But that is not to say Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast doesn’t deliver. The British band tosses their gospel-y backup singers up front and center, knocking down 2010’s ceiling to let the sunshine love of the ’70s beat down with its sweet sitar rays in tracks like “”Who Fingered Rock’n’Roll.”” The song “”Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast”” calls longingly after the Beach Boys, who are having margaritas at a side table while “”Operation Push”” channels “”Battlestar Galactica”” with electro beeps and bops and space gun zings.

Cornershop invoke some of their old tricks on quirky interludes like “”Half Brick,”” which storms the middle of the skating rink, the disco ball beaming, as a man with a microphone pumps up the teeming crowd, and “”Shut Southall Down,”” a feminine voice chatting on the phone in Spanish over an early ’90s backdrop beat; quick little minute ditties that leave you wondering what the hell just happened.

“”Free Love”” is the next pleasantly chilled-out “”Jai Ho,”” and “”Chamchu”” is their nugget of greatness — buried under 10 songs of enjoyably unremarkable melting pots of

Brit/Hindi/indie pop. “”Chamchu”” is like listening to a tinker’s cart careen down Lombard Street with a boombox on top remixing the last 20 years of pop music. Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast is an agreeable album designed to loosen minds and let it be — whatever “”it”” is.