Readymades (album)

Critical reception

The album was met with mixed reviews from critics. While Allmusic praised the album's consistency and noted that it "basically follows the pattern laid out on their previous two albums," adding that "the pop is a little more forward, as is the political theorizing," music critic Robert Christgau dismissed the album as containing "faux-slick truths about real world horror." The album holds a rating of one and a half stars in the Rolling Stone Album Guide, which called the album "skippable" and commented that it was "a vacant, hookless dud: folk song samples and bland singing pasted onto prefab dance grooves."

Track listing

All tracks written, arranged and produced by Chumbawamba, except where noted.

Album detail

In a now-inaccessible statement on their website, Chumbawamba stated that "When we decided to mimic Moby's sampling of traditional black American blues singers on his album Play, we turned to British folk music and its great voices. Kate Rusby, Dick Gaughan, Coope, Boyes & Simpson, Harry Cox. Our album Readymades was put together in a skewed homage to some of those voices. We half expected criticism from the folk world for messing around with the music, but found that the folk audience is assuredly open to change and diversity. Since then – even in the last four or five years – the modern folk voices and players have multiplied and expanded, folkies are looking younger and cooler and there are loads of new folk albums out every month. Good or bad, the music's often inspiring and exciting. That there's still a radical voice in folk music (and especially in its audience) makes it easy for us to write and play the way we're doing right now. Trying to be part of a radical tradition that, for us, encompasses our own histories (mostly northern working towns, The Beatles and punk rock!) and the history of rebel songs in the places we've lived."

Personnel

with