AMG Review of 4-Track Adventures of Venice Shoreline Chris

Rick Anderson
All Music Guide

In the wake of the breakup of Canadian ska band King Apparatus, singer and guitarist Chris Murray hunkered down in his living room with a cruddy four-track cassette recorder and made one of the best ska albums of 1996, an extremely catchy and good-natured half-hour of snappy tunes and sonic sludge. It sounds as if he used plastic buckets for drums -- and he plays some of the basslines on the low strings of an acoustic guitar -- but to be fair, the sound isn't that much weirder than the one Lee "Scratch" Perry was creating at the height of the Black Ark period. And those songs! "Ex-Darling" is guaranteed to stick in your skull and drive you crazy for weeks; the rudeboy anthem "Sammy Come a Jail" is the most perfect imitation of late-'60s Jamaican ska ever made on the North American continent; "All-Nite Dinah" is a delicious, greasy, organ-based instrumental; and "Cooper Station Blues," which closes the album, recounts the difficulties Murray had convincing Moon label head Rob Hingley to release the album. Listeners will understand why this album was a hard sell, but they'll be glad that Hingley finally relented.