The Shamen, Boss Drum
Accomplished, agenda-setting electro album that was totally in tune with its time.
Released at a time when post-acid-house dance music was dominating the British music scene, Boss Drum seemed to have an uncanny handle on the cultural zeitgeist. The Shamen were not unique in forsaking indie rock for club rhythms — fellow Scots Primal Scream were among the many artists who made the same journey — but their grip seemed somehow surer, their take on cutting-edge electronica more genuine and visionary.
Boss Drum was the first album the group had recorded since former band lynchpin Will Sinnott, aka Will Sin, drowned in the Canary Islands on a 1990 video shoot. On their return, founder Colin Angus had been joined by MC/DJ/rapper Mr C and soul chanteuse Jhelisa Anderson and their beats, while still hard-edged, seemed more targeted towards the charts and commercial success.
It was to their credit that they did this without compromising the politicised, socially aware message at their core. The Shamen had always had something to say, and Boss Drum found them pushing their theories of transcendence and the Gaia Mind over techno rhythms as mesmerising and hypnotic as those generated by any blissed-out acid casualties. This might have been floor-filling club music but it was anything but mindless.
Mr C proved to be an acquired taste, his often cheesy rapping more valiant than it was virtuoso, and his New Age eulogising of cosmic vibes on hit singles "L.S.I.: Love Sex Intelligence" and "Phorever People" polarised listeners between those who valued his idiosyncratic input and the considerable number who wanted to slap him upside the head. Nevertheless, he was at the heart of the Shamen's finest moment, the subversive jape that saw them hit No. 1 in the UK with a dance anthem, "Ebeneezer Goode," whose chorus boasted, “E's are good, E's are good — he's Ebeneezer Goode.” As a media furor predictably erupted around them, Angus and Mr C somehow maintained straight faces as they denied the song was about ecstasy. Nobody in their right mind believed them.
Boss Drum scored three UK Top 10 singles and placed the Shamen right at the heart of the post-acid-house cultural debate in Britain, but it was to prove their commercial and musical high-water mark. By their 1995 follow-up, Axis Mutatis, Britpop was upon us and their moment had passed. Yet for a while, back in the hedonistic early 1990s, the Shamen were onto something.
