Shoot From The Hip

International edition. ‘Shoot from the Hip’ is the follow up to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s triple-platinum selling debut album ‘Read My Lips’ (2001). The album features various co-writers & producers including Bernard Butler, Alex James, & Groove Armada’s Andy Cato & is a heady mix of disco, pop, & rock. The single ‘Mixed Up World’ is also included. Polydor. 2003.
Shoot from the Hip, the follow-up to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s first solo offering Read My Lips, takes the formula that made the latter so popular and twists it into something altogether different. Here, there’s the same distinctive (and occasionally grating) vocal and strong melodies now bent and deformed through a time tunnel to the 1980s. Beat-heavy, quasi-electronica pop anthems rub padded shoulders with more traditional Bextor fare (the superb “Mixed Up World”), alongside more experimental cuts where tunes seem to have evaporated when mixed, such as “You Get Yours”. For most of the time, though, she just sounds like the Pet Shop Boys.
For all their fancy retro clothes, these are mainly love songs–most of them almost decent and all of them referring to a ubiquitous second person (“Nowhere Without You”, “I Won’t Change You”, “The Walls Keep Saying Your Name”). No rocket science here then. “I Am Not Good at Not Getting What I Want” is strong, largely due to its pleasantly surprising surf guitar (probably not heard on a mainstream album since the Pulp Fiction soundtrack), combining strings and synths in equal parts. Weird mixture? That’s Shoot from the Hip. –Cortman Virtue