Plaid & Bob Jaroc ‎– Greedy Baby

A good set of 9 new plaid tracks: some are stronger, longer than others, while some are clearly writtern more as "accompaniment" music for Bob Jaroc's visuals (eg. War Dialler), and for me sound rather art-house - creative yet cold.

The movies and visuals are very professionally done, but again, some better than others. Read on for a few examples.

Zala - what's the point? Interesting imagery but nothing actually happens! Just a strange figurine standing (doing nothing) in front of a whirling toy house-end, as the camera zooms out for 5 minutes. A friend of mine said while watching: "I don't get why it's on this album, but it'd make a good poster".

I Citizen The Loathsome - Smooth and interesting track, but again set against nice scrolling still visuals, not a lot happening. Almost like an urban visual ambience backing the track.

The Launching Of Big Face - Clever, works with the beautiful music beautifully. It's like an blotter-ink tracing of a coccoon developing into a butterfly at 70fps, but you're never gonna work out how the imagery was acieved!

The Return Of Super Barrio - Stunning, quirky animation to the funkiest, longest track on the album.

Crumax Rins - 70fps and getting faster all the way - super-strobing through all CNN coverage of the run up to the Invasion of Iraq, set against the dark backdrop of one of the best, most pulsating tracks on SPOKES (2003). Incredible bonus to the pack.

This release in a nutshell - Super-killer, albeit with some filler. I love Plaid. 4/5.

This is the thing I have been waiting so long. I was very lucky to see Andy/Ed/Bob’s live gig at Optronica 2005. I can’t believe that it took whole year after the show to publish DVD. When the digipack finally came to me it was very funny to see panorama of bfi London’s interior where I was watching their live performance on the sleeve. The DVD is good but it doesn’t allure for a long time: footages, computer graphics, physical phenomenon... For me the best are cartoon 'Super Barrio' Tokyo footages 'Zn zero' and birds' flying at 'To'.
The music is remarkable! Plaid has own distinctive style and the amount of new ideas in its context amazed me. If you liked previous albums of the duo you’ll certainly love this.

Funky and creepy would be good descriptions for Plaid's "Greedy Baby". While i'm not sure if this release is supposed to be an album.. I consider it an EP. Most of the tracks bring to mind a jungle of glass. Lots of shard sound and drums. Some people seem to be unhappy with this release, but I find it to be a pretty strong EP with Plaid heading a good musical direction. The DVD, which has videos for the songs by Bob Jaroc, only adds to the quality of the release and is a nice bonus. The set usually goes for 20 bucks, but the record shop I bought mine from happened to have a sale on all electronic music and I only paid 15. So i'm pretty happy with this purchase and lokking forward to Plaid to pursue this sound more.

I've now spent several years listening to remarkably similar comments about Plaid - essentially the same comments about every single one of their releases - and I think the time has come for a brief review of my own. The long-awaited public availability of Greedy Baby and the resultant (and instantaneous) backlash in the press and popular media is incentive enough for me...

All I will say is that for a musical approach (I won't call it a "genre") which already, by definition, requires proper and repeated listening and assimilation, Plaid, like the Black Dog before them, have always been the most slow-burn, and quite possibly the most unusual. I know people who didn't "get" Spanners for eight years and suddenly just clicked one day, wondering why they had never understood what the Black Dog had been up to until that very moment. While the "people just don't understand it" comment may seem like a tired old chestnut at this point in time, it nonetheless applies here, and with recent advances in communications and the public proliferation of personal opinion, it has become all the more obvious and prominent. Plaid's music (and their albums in particular, for some reason - maybe just due to their sheer length) always makes people falsely believe there's just nothing really going on inside, and at first, pretty much every new track/EP/album sounds somewhat uninteresting and simple, even to old-timer, dyed-in-the-wool fanatics like myself, who know of this fundamental rule and still fall into the same old trap. This actually is, I feel, one of the main reasons why Plaid are so great, and it is also a conscious product of their approach. It is also why they really are every bit as "intellectual" and experimental as their contemporaries, and perhaps even more so. Their music stands up to far more repeated listenings, over a greater number of years, than anyone I can care to mention, and ultimately proves much more rewarding.

The thrust of my argument is that they have been slagged off incessantly by a great many people ever since they began making music, and most often for the same two or three rather contradictory reasons, and also most often after far too short a time to allow for the familiarity that their work demands as a precursor to appreciation. In other words, people - particularly people who know who Plaid are, who care enough to listen at all, and who therefore should know better - would do well to take the time to see what's really "in there" before commenting either way.

That said, after a full week of repeated listenings, and following an initial reaction of shock, surprise and, yes, even disappointment on certain levels, I am now enjoying Greedy Baby immensely, though I'm still not even past my initial reaction stage. Basically, however, I fear that this might turn out to be another eight-years-later sort of deal in the making for a lot of listeners, which would be unfortunate. I believe that, after having gone through so much to release this at last, they deserve better than a quick scan through the CD and a thoughtless one-note dismissive blurb where a reasoned review or comment should be. Listen to this one properly, as I think it might actually be worth your time. Though not everyone can like the same things in the same way, it's still sad when people miss out on something they might truly enjoy simply because it guards its secrets all too well.

I can only comment on the music part of this release (the cd) and whilst it is very Plaid it simply does not truly match the depth of thier original releases.
If you are prepared to look for it, there are people who have copied Plaid and Black Dog Productions who are making a better job of consistently giving us the IDM we want.
Greedy Baby...? We have been waiting a long time now for the old days of Plaid to return and perhaps, dare I say it, they are not coming back. Sorry but I am not being greedy, just expectant, and expectations are never realised these past years by the men who invented IDM.