Shpongle - Tales Of The Inexpressible

As the album-title suggests, skipping this means you are missing the "Inexpressible"! In my humble opinion, Shpongle's "Tales of the Inexpressible" is one of the most perfected musical achievements ever produced...Each and every track is both unique and beautiful; it seriously requires multiple listenings for grasping. My personal favourite tracks though are #: 2,7,8,9. The blending of psy-ambient trance with Raja's flute echoe out tales that indeed prove to be inexpressible to the human mind and ear...

Basically, if you don't have this album you should slap yourself. Amazing combination of wordly elements and Psychedelic Trance... along with ambient and many other styles. In fact, you can pick up just around every style of music some place in this album. A landmark album. I still think it is the best of Shpongles 3 albums also. Goes from Happy to Dark, Powerful to Soothing, Uplifting to Twisted... great stuff.

I'd agree with dreamworld's comments regarding the psychedelic drug influences - they do get a little tiring. Still, this is such a departure from both the more common club and rave trance sound and from Hallucinogen's standard style that it's well worth the listen. The influences of spanish guitar, middle eastern rhythm and calypso sound really take you on a journey. It's well worth owning.

This CD is an incredible textured journey through psychedelic space. Different musical styles infuzed into an electronic background: latin, irish, flutes, etc, etc. Great for a meditative flight through the unknown. I just can't wait for their next album.

This is a good album, much aclaimed for its versatile mix of styles including mixing latin rhythms and mixing live instruments with programmed sounds which is definetly an area that electronic music could do with exploring further. And it does sound absolutely superb. And yet I cant helfp thinking that it still hasn't done 'something'. Electronic music has been confined by breakbeats and doofdoofdoof 4/4 rhthms for too long. Why do we need to hang on to the old cliches at all. Terence Mkenna samples played through a delay pedal etc etc Its all been done to death. Electronic dance music in its heyday was amazing because it changed and mutated ALL THE TIME a style would would come and die in the blink of an eye . This is a beutiful masterpiece built on foundations of cliches. If Shpongle could just ditch the need to to culturally identify themselves with a withered underground and unsustainable drug culture (take a longer toke - terence Mkenna etc etc My head feels like a frisbee, everythings disjointed blah blah blah) I think they could do something REALLY amazing original and genuinely psychedelic in a much more profound way. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking this album, its about the best thing I've heard out in the last 5 years, but if this scene is going to evolve and not continue repeating itself down a dead end path its got to do something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and come from whats happening right now. It's a tricky problem for us all to solve.