How the hell am I meant to start a review for pretty much the best and most important record not only of this year, but possibly even of this decade (well, out of music coming from this country, at least)? A complete, unqualified masterpiece of the already-familiar-from-demos and so much more. The fastest, most exciting guitar pop record (see also: ‘record generally’) in like forever. An album that rivals even Slanted & Enchanted for both realization of prior-release promise and sounding so consummately the indie-rock milestone throughout? And also for me loving it. Time to take gratuitous fun as seriously as possible.Boom! Johnny Foreigner began when Pavement and the Pixies collided with Cap’n Jazz and Q And Not U somewhere over Birmingham and singer/guitarist Alexei mutated after being landed on by the resultant goo. Or, at least, they might as well have done. Either way this is the most perfect, double-speeded boy-girl shouty hook-stuffed-to-bursting pop music in the world. This isn’t even just brilliant pop music, this is pretty much a completely new way of doing pop, a new way of stuffing as much pop brilliance as possible into every single song. Johnny Foreigner have cracked the code, people. Alexei, Kelly and Junior are like cartoon heroes, superhuman in their abilities to sound like so much more than 3 people playing at once whilst still sounding *exactly* like *3 people, playing at once!*. If that makes any sort of sense at all. Alexei especially is the most creative pop guitarist I’ve heard since, like, Alden Penner. In an interview I did with him recently he said that when he writes songs he gets what he said a: “fZZZT BzzT in my head and there’s a bit of a song there,” and I totally love how just right that description of his song writing process sounds. This is fZZZT BzzT music. There’s no better way to describe how electric and magical its inspiration must be.I feel (almost) bad for screaming so consistently about how unqualified its greatness is. Because this is not really a record *designed* (or at least not designed specifically) for greatness, if it wasn’t so amazingly, hit-you-over-the-head-constantly-with-how-good-it-is-and-make-you-want-to-listen-to-it- over-and-over-again-forever brilliant then you could almost call it unassuming. Alexei is pretty much the nicest of my heroes I have ever met, and Johnny Foreigner’s egotism/sheer talent ratio doesn’t seem to correlate with how you might think it would at all, thus making them ‘just’ an absolutely amazing (indie) pop band. Which is of course is ‘just’ the best thing in all the world.But you switched-on teens will have probably already heard well over half of this in some form already (and I’m speaking to you as if this is BEFORE you downloaded the leak). ‘The End And Everything After’ and ‘Yes! You Talk Too Fast’ return re-recorded from Arcs Across The City; ‘Cranes x4’, ‘Sometimes In The Bullring’, ‘Yr All Just Jealous’, ‘Absolute Balance’ and ‘The Hidden Song At The End Of The Record’ (the last two being the renamed ‘Balance, Comma, Girl’ and ‘The End As A Beginning’ respectively) do the same from the demos collection; ‘Eyes Wide Terrified’ and ‘Our Bipolar Friends’ have already been heard as singles; even ‘Hennings Favourite’ and ‘Salt Pepa & Spinderella’ have been streaming from their Myspace too. So in fact, this leaves just opener ‘Lea Room’ and token slow song ‘DJs Get Doubts’ as genuinely new. This is no bad thing: for one, those songs are both awesome. For another: even-better new re-recorded versions! Now normally you know how more ‘professionally’ produced versions of songs are rubbish and loose all the charm and usually a bit of the tempo for some reason too so they totally cloy on the ears? (see: Black Kids) Well JoFo fans, rejoice, because this album really, really doesn’t do that. In fact, it probably even makes them faster, or at least brings out new amazingness in them, particularly with what they do with the vocals (case in point especially being ‘The End And Everything After’ with the way they layer the backing vocals towards the end and stuff becomes so ridiculously awesome the master tapes of it are probably sonically unstable and have to be held in a special magnetic field so they don’t just spill out and infect the whole planet with unreasonable and unsafe joy). The vocals on ‘Eyes Wide Terrified’ are pretty stunning too.Is it perfect, then? Well is anything? So probably not. Well, probably not *quite*. For example: I do not become completely dizzy with joy hearing literally every second of it. Just most of them. The way ‘Our Bipolar Friends’ starts with that “blending in like ninja” line I’m not the world’s biggest fan of. I mean, I *like* it, but I’m not the world’s absolutely biggest fan of it. Also, some of my favourite Johnny Foreigner songs, like ‘Sofacore’, ‘Another Ghost, Another Planet’, ‘Say It When Yr Sober’ and ‘The Houseparty Scene Is Killing You’ did not make it onto the album. On the other hand, though, I can still just listen to them when I have a few minutes not listening to Waited Up Til It Was Light.Finally, ‘Absolute Balance’ is not as good a title as ‘Balance, Comma, Girl’, and even more so ‘The Hidden Song At The End Of The Record’ is a total non-improvement on ‘The End As A Beginning’. In fact it makes it seem quite impersonal (despite the fact that, yeah, I can see why they’ve done it because it is broadly amusing and post-modern). But hey, when it just gets faster and faster and faster at the end to finish it”¦Waited Up Til It Was Light is full of those just utterly perfect moments. “I CANNNNN’T LOOSE YOU IN CROWDED ROOMS!”, “Hot girls know the words to our songs,” “Oh, you’ll nevaaaaa,” etc. And it’s not *just* lightning-addictive shouty, fuzzy candy-pop either (well, if you think it is “just” that then it wouldn’t be all that bad a thing anyway, but we’ve already sort of covered that ground earlier and I don’t really want to risk going too-enthusiastically round and round in circles over and over again). There’s a solid emotional core to some of these songs too. ‘Yr All Just Jealous’, ‘Sometimes In The Bullring’ and ‘Salt, Pepa & Spinderella’ especially. But it’s not really about that. Oh fuck, it’s boy-girl pop as informed by Cap’n Jazz, it’s just like something out of some beautiful dream.This album is unhealthy though. I’ve not properly listened to anything else in days. Aw, who needs to though? It’s even named after a Casiotone For The Painfully alone lyric. Screw trying to make it look like it isn’t quite 100% perfect, I’m just giving it top marks anyway. Seriously: Slanted & Enchanted. It’s on a par with it, and at its own game. Well done, Johnny Foreigner. Thank you for fully justifying my hyperbole and love.Actually I’m going to take a break from it now before I get bored and don’t love it as much. Still: 100% No, wait, maybe: 98% (Aw, who knows...)[Download Johnny Foreigner]Links Johnny Foreigner [myspace] [20 questions]