Jeff Wayne - The War Of The Worlds : ULLAdubULLA The Remix Album

There are albums and there are remix albums. And then there are those albums you see crouching in the back of the cd rack, calling to you in a sinister voice: "buy me...buy me or you'll REGRET IT!" I managed to snag a copy of this two cd set in a European airport duty-free shop; you do not know the meaning of terrifying until you listen to Hybrid's remix of Richard Burton prophesying the end of the world while at a cruising altitude of 30,000 feet. The whole album, in fact, has a certain paradoxical sense of incredible gravity and absurd weightlessness to it; you just can't believe you're listening to it, that someone would make it in the first place, but it's good, very good. To envision the path from H.G. Well's novel in the 1890's to Jeff Wayne's original musical, circa 1978, is an astronomical stretch of the imagination, one with plenty of space for camp and strangeness, synthesizers and snappy orchestral progressions. The strength of this album lies in it's absolute seriousness, even in the face of logic-defying stylistic leaps. The highlight of this is Max Mondo's seductive and haunting remix of Spirit of Man--a highlight, that is, when contrasted with KCW's remix of the same song, done in bouncing reggae with key changes that leap like tree frogs. The second CD seems like the overkill of the martian invasion. The blood-red and black first disc nicely packages the entire novel/ play/ concept even while drawing parallels between Welle's technological nightmare and the emotions of modern electronic music. It even paying homage to the horror movies of bygone popularity from the era of the orginal Orson Welle's radio broadcast. The second disc is just more of the same. However, more techno is more techno, and there is no techno like orchestrated, full symphony techno. Buy this album. Buy this album or you will REGRET IT.