Black Box Recorder

"Life is unfair/ Kill yourself or get over it." These were the most memorable lyrics from Black Box Recorder's debut album, England Made Me. An album that was so miserable and depressing that it was truly a hilarious offering. For their second album, The Facts Of Life, BBR have selected sex and death as their topics of choice. The music is soft and slow, with plenty of nods to Serge Gainsbourg in style and the lyrics are along the lines of Jarvis Cocker's seductive whispers. In fact, there are plenty of similarities to Pulp's 1998 album, This Is Hardcore; they recently had Jarvis and Steve (from Blur) remix their second single, "The Facts Of Life." The Facts Of Life begins with "The Art Of Driving," a song that relates to every character in Crash - a conversation between a man and a woman, where he tries to coax her into taking a ride in his car, if you know what I mean. The band is brutally honest in their music and analysing the lyrics alone is a lot of fun. Like their debut album, this is sick and twisted, but what else would you expect from the leader of the Auteurs - a man that once wrote an album about the joys of terrorism.