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To ape is to imitate, according to my Pocket Webster School
& Office Dictionary, and the act of aping goes back all
the way to the beginning of recorded history! Probably before
that, too! It’s true! All you have to do to take one look
at the ancestral lines of human evolution, and it’s plain
as day: Homo Rudolfensis severely ripped off Australopithecus
Africanus, aping his design and use of tools. Homo Erectus
aped Homo Rudolfensis and used those tools to make fire. All
that aping (by apes!) eventually led to the building of shelters,
and then, art.
It’s easy to see the important role that aping has played
in human development. Plato aped Socrates, and thank goodness
he did because Socrates, The Original Punk, never wrote anything
down. Voltaire wrote "Originality is nothing but judicious
imitation", and Voltaire would know, cuz he was aping Descartes,
and Voltaire himself was later aped by Jean-Paul Sarte. Freud
aped Mesmer, and Jung got his start in the psycho-biz aping
Freud. Darwin aped Alfred Wallace famously, and The Kansas
State Board Of Education is still going ape! Dylan
aped Guthrie, The Beatles aped Dylan for a while,
and The Rolling Stones (featuring the monkey’s uncle-faced
Mick Jagger) aped The Beatles and made monkeys of themselves
on Her Satanic Majesty’s Request. Sometime after that,
Roddy McDowell aped an ape named Cornelius in The Planet
Of The Apes. Charlton Heston dismissed the entire planet
as a place inhabited by a "BUNCH OF DAMN DIRTY APES!" Christopher
Walken never starred in a movie with Charlton Heston, but
he did jump around like a monkey in a Fatboy Slim video.
Fatboy Slim has made a nice career of aping Chicago House
Deejays, (millions of little kids all around the world
luv Mr. Cook’s contribution to The Digimon Movie Soundtrack!)
and now The Plump DJs are aping him, but they don’t have a
cute picture of an ape on the cover of their new record…that’s
The Basement Jaxx new one.
Lee Rous and Andy Gardner, the story goes, took their name
Plump DJs from a English skin rag called "Plumpers", but upon
listening to Plumps Night Out, (grrreat title!) one
has to wonder if the Plump moniker was a gentle tip of the
turntable to Fatboy Slim. If so, good…they owe him. The Plumpers
borrow heavily from Fatboy’s trickbag, deploying electrobeats
that multiply, divide, and multiply again faster than the
interest on yer VISA card, pulling background rhythms cobbled
from old school guitar and Bootsy-style bass lines out slowly
into the forefront, letting the entire event dissolve into
inaudible static, then building it back up again into a full
court press on yer cerebral cortex, as well as the ol’ hipbones.
With Fatboy reaching farther out for song structure by paring
down the length of some of his jams and employing the warm
and delicious bourbon rasp of a "real" (and how!) vocalist,
Miss Macy Gray, I guess there is elbow space
available for The Plumps and their full-length party spinsational
monkeyshines. My instinctive reaction was to dismiss them
as cheap imitations, another set of UK club scenesters churning
out more monkey-see, monkey-do danceplop music, but
that would be unfair. This shit is funky, and I’m playing
it at my next bash because people will move to it…they won’t
be able to help themselves. I would bet a small sum of cash
that while the bodies of my guests are preferentially metabolizing
their fat cells as energy sources to the Plump beats, they
won’t know or care if they are dancing to Original Music or
a Judicious Imitation thereof…viva la evolution!
—Jeff Noise
Track Listing:
- Intro
- Pucker Up!
- Electric Disco
- No Way
- Bumper
- Fever
- The Push
- Galaxy
- Here We Go
- I’ll Get You
- Move It With Your Mind
- Scram
 Talk
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