Positive Touch

H-Y-P I'm Hypnotised! I've checked the relevant source and their advice is simple: sit down, relax and cancel all other engagements. The Undertones have returned triumphant.

Where Hypnotised, on its release, seemed like a creative peak for the pop-plus preparations of The Undertones, it can now be seen as merely the end of a first giddy phase. What with attention being focussed until very recently on the band's legal entanglement with their former label Sire Records, there was really no indication available that, all the while. The 'Tones were honing a body of material which would prove to be as stunning and inventive as Positive Touch.

Apart from being the album which logs the travels of an Undertone band going where no other Undertone band has gone before, 'Positive Touch' also serves as a resoundingly victorious response to suggestions that the band are over the hill.

'Positive Touch' also marks a maturing of the Undertone world view – while the occasional song such as 'His Good-Looking Girlfriend' recalls the more simplistic set-pieces of yesteryear, the majority of the album is noticeably bereft of references to first cousins, Mars Bars and Subbuteo. The Undertones have grown up in public!

More immediately though, it's the sheer breadth of musical versatility – both stylistically and instrumentally – which grabs the listener's attention.

'Fascination' and 'Julie Ocean', the opening two tracks, offer some hint of the scope of the album, the former employing a belligerent drum tattoo and backing vocals from 'Stranded In The Jungle', while the latter is a beautifully haunting guitar vignette with Feargal's vocal on the chorus awash with echo.

Surprise follows delicious surprise. 'Life's Too Easy' places a jazzy bass-line alongside a Bo Diddley beat and still finds time for a towering refrain of 'Here it comes' which lodges in the mind on first hearing.

Lyrically, the song also represents the band's first really direct comment on the Northern Ireland situation, but it's a comment born of personal experience of the random terror rather than an attempt at striking some kind of conclusive overview. It simply says: we have had to learn to live with fear while those outside the province might carp and complain at far lesser evils. It's not a novel thought and certainly not an especially profound one, but it is heart-felt and well articulated. In a more general sense, the song, taken as a complete creation, highlights what seems to be a fundamental aim of the album – to rid the band of the stereotype image they created of themselves in the past and one which was, of course, happily embellished by all sections of the media.

That the 'Tones have achieved this, without sacrificing their transcendental pop appeal, is just one of Positive Touch's many successes.

Check the title-track for its novel (for the 'Tones) use of bottleneck-guitar, and its wildly successful Caribbean textures. Check the single 'It's Going To Happen', a brilliant mating of Teardrop-like brass and vigorous new pop. Check 'When Saturday Comes' which searches out and then re-locates the prime rules of pop-psychedelia, as they were writ by Arthur Lee and Love. Check 'Hannah Don't' for a compassionate portrayal of one of life's losers set to a marvellously electric soundtrack. Check… well look, they even manage an enterprising re-write of 'Sweet Jane' in 'I Don't Know'. What more do you need to know?

Positive Touch is just that. Look to your laurels ya Teardrops and Aztec Cameras. The Undertones are back in business and the only way they'll be ignored now, is through sheer bad taste.