Hold On It’s Easy is in fact one of Cornershop’s most difficult works, for all the wrong reasons.

While the visual presentation is a bit workaday and some of the chosen musical styles already outmoded (dubstep already being ancient history), the tracks work just fine, bristling with multi-layered mystical gibbering.

Produced by David Foster, it’s largely tremendous fun, even if the path on which it walks is rather well worn.

The band have expanded this time round, welcoming in new permanent members Tony Drummond and Walker Teret, and it’s had the effect of creating a much rawer, live-sounding album than its predecessors.

The names here deliver so much that this compilation wins the bloody bout on points.

The mild and tepid Swirling soon becomes rather repetitive, and Like A Moth gets stuck in its own saccharine, twee groove, but the majority of these eleven tracks find the band back on the right, fizzy, fuzzy, frazzled track.

Cut Copy need to learn to make music with the reckless abandon of a good night out--at whichever type of club they end up in.

The lack of personality is most strikingly felt in Kim Deal’s absence.

In its tales of life in mountain towns, of love declared and not returned, of hard decisions made, it has an honesty and a sense of wildness and isolation. It’s all quite beautiful.

An aural pool party for anyone who digs the nu-Baleric compilations of Psychemagik and Too Slow To Disco.

It’s all grimly compelling, but you won’t be whacking it on at any dinner parties. Unless you’re Andy Kaufman.

“The past is a foreign country,” sings a defiant Peters on the reliably impassioned opener In A Broken Promise Land, while both the ensuing title track and the chest-beating Return are powered by the sort of Ben Nevis-sized, heartstring-tugging Celtic guitar figures that made The Crossing such a compelling debut. It does, admittedly, fall short elsewhere.

It’s a relatively muted return, and we can only hope it’s a casual curtain-raiser to something fresher and more tangible to come.

On paper, such an ambitious sonic reinvention could easily be dismissed as an overblown conceit, yet in reality this new Classic Quadrophenia soars.

Snatches of fuzzy guitar, banjo and fiddle drift through, but the main thrust is in the singing, Carthy providing the lucid top notes while her partner is adept at shadowing her with huskier harmony.

The lines are blurred, but there’s no court ruling on whether this is cynical appropriation or genuine homage.

We’re in science fiction territory here; the dystopian synths that glide over the track’s foundations are bleak, yet comforting in their filmic familiarity. The album has its share of pacy moments, too.

Most of the stuff is catchy, with full-fat choruses on the excellent Dropping The Needle and Get On Your Knees, and while the rest of the album doesn’t push out any envelopes it offers up an energy-packed good time.

Cut down to a mini-album, We Can Do Anything would have been better worth the wait.

Hook-laden choruses and seismic riffs don’t feature heavily in the Fufanu sound--and nor should they. Like The Rapture before them, their sound is one of influences absorbed subtly.

While it believes it’s a storm of Ocean Rain-esque majesty, Meteorites fizzles out like it’s just another shower.

The overall impression is of vintage music given a modern snap and kept short and simple for maximum effect.

He and Alexander have also stayed mostly away from the slap-bass and funk drums that made Primus’ early hits so compelling, so don’t expect the usual extravagant workouts. Instead, this album is best viewed as the point where Claypool’s interests in film and music meet at a sort of psychedelic flashpoint.

They’ve now created an album which towers above the nostalgia market which could easily have been their fate.

By track 11, Let Love Lead, you feel you’ve jogged along the cliché-rich, emotion-free AOR road for longer than its 43 minutes and 57 seconds.

This is a one-joke album, but the joke is a good one, and more than a few bona fide country fans will be convinced.

All in All, a fond if sometimes overly polite farewell. [Jan 2026, p.101]

What could have been an embarrassment is a quiet triumph.