From Tom Millar Sent Thu, Jun 17th 1999, 17:54
From Tom Millar Sent Thu, Jun 17th 1999, 17:54
Today we get a selection of stuff that arrived in the mail at my college radio station just recently. Pardon for the lack of obscurity in the selections, as always. David Kristian: Beneath The Valley Of The Modulars alien8 ALIENCD16 DK's a man after my own heart- in his liner notes, he plainly states "NO SAMPLING ALLOWED." So he's already in good with yours truly. Standard Kristian fare in the vein of tracks apparently descended from cavern-dwelling fish. Strange, dark, nicely layered stuff (SAWII, anyone?) with beats of various shapes and sizes always crawling around on the bottom. Somewhat different from a lot of his stuff in that reliance on beats and basslines is much more pronounced, but since the beats & basslines are generally always on par with the stuff on top it's not a problem in any way, and certainly makes his work a little more accessible. With all the synthesized yelping here and there, it's probably about as pop as DK gets. Try it out- makes you see demons in the cinderblocks. I'm not kidding. Orbital: Middle Of Nowhere FFRR 31065-2 Insipid, cloying cheese from the depths of the Hartnoll bros.' rectums. I already have the originals of all these songs- they're on Snivilisation & the Brown album. It took me a while to really appreciate some of the stuff on In Sides, and it still sounds pretty cheesy to me in a lot of places, but they magnified all the worst parts and failed to add anything. At least the progression from each album to the next for this group used to reveal something new each time- from yer basic techno anthems on Green to yer melodic build-uppity massive symphonic constructions on In Sides. If there's anything new on this piece of shit waste of aluminum and plastic it's New Age inflections. God help us all, this sucks mule nuts. Chemical Brothers: Surrender Astralwerks ASW 47610-2 Better. The vocal tracks are a waste of time, and "hey boys hey girls" is shit, but some of the rest could be considered keepers. Of course, you're going to have to understand that any positive comments are going to be relative to the prejudiced opinion of this release I had before I even heard it. So for a Chemical Brothers record, this is great! Tracks like "music:response" and "surrender" almost make me believe again, like when I first heard "Life is Sweet" on Trance Europe Express vol.4. The Chembros have obviously been listening to a lot of old disco records, not to mention a bunch of other stuff, as there are some sounds on here I never expected to hear from them- vocoder madness all over the place, video game bleeps up in the house on track one, and world-music type stuff going on on track ten, etcetera. Track two is just a techno/hardcore stomper- what the hell! I can say for sure that this record wasn't as utterly painful to review as the Orbital album, and when we played the first track in my room the other night my extreme-noise connoisseur friend got up and performed one of the most disturbing dances I've ever seen. Whoopee Tom