Product Description

Debut album from South London quartet who've been compared to Pavement, Beck and even Steely Dan. Features the singles 'Beautiful', 'El Salvador' and 'You've Got The Style' mixingcontemporary electronica with classic guitar pop in a similar way to the Beta Band.

Track Listing

1. El Salvador
2. Westside
3. One Million
4. Shake Those Windows
5. Beautiful
6. New Project
7. You Got The Style
8. Vehicles & Animals
9. Out of Nowhere
10. Dungeness
11. You Know
12. Le Casio

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1421 in Music
• Released on: 2003-08-04
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
It's a shame that Britpop brings up memories of dull guitar-rock traditionalists stuck in thrall to the spirit of the 60s, because it's very tempting to dub Athlete's debut album, Vehicles and Animals, a minor British pop classic. The work of an East London quartet with a wry observational eye and a sound planted somewhere between Squeeze, XTC and Blur from the time of Modern Life Is Rubbish, Vehicles and Animals is a success of subtle experimentalism, box-twiddling electronic trickery and brightly optimistic pop nous. "You Got the Style" tackles racial unrest in multicultural London with a sunbeam of pure positivity, frontman Joel Pott offering "We should be laughing about it / Making the most of the true British climate" as Tim Wanstall's synth-lines bounce like stray beach balls.

Sure, Athlete specialise in big, neon sing-along choruses--see the glimmering "El Salvador", the sprawling wonder of "Beautiful"--but their approach is tempered with a very pretty vulnerability. "Westside" opens with a hushed acoustic lead-in where Pott's cracked, fragile vocal shakily tests out the chorus--"Wherever you look you can see / Everybody wants to be part of the rock scene"--before the song explodes into life. It's the sort of sunny disposition that could almost define a new British climate. Looks like it's turned out nice again. --Louis Pattison

Customer Reviews

All time classic album
Having followed Athlete from thier start, I perhaps have a more biast view on this album than thier second, thinking it far superior. If you liked Tourist, hopefully you will love this album. This album shows Athlete trying to find themselves, and the result is an album full of completely different songs, all of which are pulled of spectacularly. Sadly I found thier second album (Tourist), though much better produced, much less diverse, they took the 'sound' from the few songs that did well from Vehicles and Animals and repeated it over and over to make quite a dull album, compared to the frivolous and different sounds of the songs shown in Vehicles and Animals.

Hopefully Athletes 3rd album will move back to the more experimental music making shown in this album, yet keep the richer and well produced sound of the second album.

Loved it!!
I can honestly say that there isn't one song that i didn't enjoy- I still can't take it out of the car!!

Britpop but updated
This is a fairly good album, its on of those albums which are nice, light hearted, and easy to listen to. We all have these types of albums in our collections so dont judge it too harshly. Yes, it isn't a master piece, this isn't the new dark side of the moon, but if you want somthing to listen to and not that fussed then this album is great for it. All songs are very easy to go back to again and again, it is a bit like britpop but slightly modernised, although not in the ranks of the great blur or pulp. So give it a try, its not everyone's cuppa tea but arwell a fairly decent attempt