The new album from Norway’s Los Plantronics, Surfing Times (an adventurous surf-related concept album), is a head spinning trip from berzerk surf-rock to crooning mariachi tunes. The result is a magical musical ride, from the “roots of surf” including wild '50s rock’n’roll, instrumental passages and frantic R&B, via the Surf-Age and '60s garage and Tex Mex, all the way to a place where surf meets psych, latin-exotica and hot swinging movie soundtracks...

I'm going to admit that I didn't enjoy this album, and certainly wouldn't have voluntarily listened to it for pleasure. It's just not my thing. That said, I think the band should be given more exposure, purely for refusing to follow the herd. There's a lot of interesting and clever ideas thrown into the cooking pot and the end results are way better than they have any right to be. Mixing mariachi and '50s rock'n'roll is just crazy... but it works.

There's a sprinkling of the rock'n'roll of Elvis, the piano of Jerry Lee Lewis and the guitar of Chuck Berry and The Shadows (the first three all come together, rather wonderfully in 'Red Hot').

One of the highlights has to be the mariachi version of Gene Clark's 'So You Say You Lost Your Baby'.

If someone had slipped LSD into the Shadows food, asked them to write and perform the soundtrack to a futuristic Mexican Western movie based in space... and then recorded the results... it would probably sound a lot like Surfing Times.

5

Nick Smithson