Albums that you have forgotten you love: Becoming X by Sneaker Pimps

N.B. If you are in the US, it looks like this instead.

Track listing:

1. Low Place Like Home
2. Tesko Suicide
3. 6 Underground
4. Becoming X
5. Spin Spin Sugar
6. Post-Modern Sleaze
7. Waterbaby
8. Roll On
9. Wasted Early Sunday Morning
10. Walking Zero
11. How Do

Becoming X is undoubtedly very 90s-sounding, but it really does still sound great...so good that I wanted to include a download of almost every song, but I have limited myself! After this album, Sneaker Pimps (who took their name from an article in which The Beastie Boys were talking about hiring someone to find classic trainers for them) parted ways with singer Kelli Dayton (also known as Kelli Ali), which may have been their biggest mistake. The only track that I have found to my liking since her departure is Blacksheep.

The first half of the album is better than the second, but it is all good; and it brings back such memories for me when I listen. From the beaty, but aloof and phlegmatic, Tesko Suicide, to the sublime 6 Underground (which has to be a classic 90s song...it was even featured on that most seminal, in various senses of the word, of 90s dramas This Life) and the clubby sleaze of Spin Spin Sugar, the styles on this album are varied, but generally sound quite spaced out and dispassionate...although that is not a criticism. This is electronica, trip-hop, guitar-based indie, it even flirts with rock (as Sneaker Pimps explicitly did on Long Hard Road Out Of Hell with Marilyn Manson, for which the video is below), but above all this is pop music, largely as a result of Dayton's bubblegum voice.

It all culminates with How Do. You know that scene in The Wicker Man where a naked Britt Ekland is pressed up against, and seductively pawing, a wall, distracting the virginal Edward Woodward from his thoughts of Christian chastity? Yep? Well, this is that song, covered here very nicely (but I still can't listen to it without visualising that scene).

N.B. Make sure you buy the original 1996 album if you can, and not the reissue; the latter features different (read: inferior) versions of several of the tracks.


Sneaker Pimps - Spin Spin Sugar
(This video totally reminds me of the film 'Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas')

Marilyn Manson and Sneaker Pimps - Long Hard Road Out Of Hell
(From the 'Spawn' soundtrack. It seems they didn't exactly 'click' - read about that here and here)