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Earth (2) - The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull - 25-Sep-08 05:19 AM
Like other reviewers say, this album is a bit difficult to label unless you listen to it, given the stoner/metal/whatever style that this group has been attached to. I knew Earth thanks to that wonderful gig called "Primavera Club" in Barcelona, where they presented this album and its characteristics: slow, slooow, slooooow jams of echoed guitars with westerner chords that made it a kind of heroine-influenced post-rock, with very subtle progression during the tracks, but post-rock after all. Even with its jazzy bits.

After labeling it, this is a wonderful album too, with its peak just in the middle: the riff of "Engine of Ruin" is addictive and describes the relaxed, just a bit doomed athmosphere of the whole disc. Very recommended, and see them live if you can.

Neon Phusion - The Future Ain't The Same As It Used 2 B - 08-Sep-08 12:14 PM
This could well be the album that oficially began all the broken beat craze, and is a good who-is-who of the scene: there are a few people missing, but almost all the Bugz crew and friends are here, though the sound is closer to the works of Afronaught than the rest of the collaborators. There are many highlights: they already showed here their craft for melody and rhythms in programmed jams like Blue Tetra, Hot Ice or Space Jam, they already knew how to take advantages of vocalists in Kula Maku and How Times Fly, and they already began with their arch-typical songs based on phrases repeated again and again in a syncopated chorus in Destination and The Future Ain't The Same... and, of course, remains one of the better albums of their whole output and the genre itself. Even Bembe Segue is already singing in the title track!

Everything But The Girl - Temperamental - 25-Aug-08 03:18 PM
Lately I listened to this album again, trying to discover if it worked only because the production tricks and the lyrics still made it survive, or if the production didn't work and the lyrics were not strong anymore, or any other permutation; you know, listening again to big selling pop-electronica albums that you have nearly forgotten can be a risky excercise. And well, it still works completely, at every level. Watt and Thorn talk about the city (London), about the feelings of isolation surrounded by people, the things they see, what they feel, what the city adds or substracts to human relations and human love - strangely, it could be the soundtrack to that Winterbottom beautiful masterpiece called 'Wonderland', if it didn't already have a gorgeous Nyman composition - and they do that with very cold rhythms: deep house blended with dance (where reverbs are only heard in Tracey's voice), ballads disguised as trip-hop (and the song with the most - depressing - self-pityness in the whole Thorn's catalog, 'Low tide of the night'?), a curious drum 'n bass number, and finally, to end up with an optimistic note, the best thing either they or Deep Dish have ever done, "The Future of the Future". Yes, it does not sound so revolutionary as "Walking Wounded" - where production tricks were exaggerated to give the most melodrama to the lonely feelings of the songs - but, listening to it 9 years later, you realize that very few acts could make that perfect blend of heartfelt songs and electronic touches. Extremely recommended if you live in a big city and need some songs that talk about you while you dance at them.

Madelman - Palais - 08-Jul-08 05:46 AM
One of the few 'pure' electronica albums during the 90's, this is very similar to the trance-ambient sounds with lots of oldschool whinks (Fluke, Spooky, or Orbital, which is the one Madelman resembles most). Very melodic, it is also one of the jewels that Cosmos Records gave us (a great music label dedicated to more experimental electronica), and it is somewhat famous because its first song was featured in the important compilation Siglo XXI.

What is more curious about this record is how the career of Madelman developed: he abandoned this kind of electronica and embraced, with another girl, a kind of bubblegum techno group called Chico y Chica, which is very very different from what he mastered here.

La Casa Azul - Tan Simple Como El Amor - 06-Jul-08 09:17 AM
In my opinion, the best spanish pop record of all these years, the best work of this genious called Guille Milkyway, and an amazing work of art that should be known everywhere. The intention is clear: bring all the "bubblegum" sounds, japonese pop, sixties songs and Brian Wilson, mix all those influences together, and spice them with lyrics that talk about (lack of) love, social inadaptation, pop culture, near dystopic worlds of many colours.

Maybe the first times you listen to these songs you find them too poppy, too cheesy. That's right, they sound like it. Now understand the lyrics, where the singer shows pain of not being loved and being single. How a boy with a lot of complexes, which always finds shelter in the world of sixties' lollypop, feels about love and sex? This collection of songs sound so personal, so visceral, so amazing that they always leave me down, though they are happy, when I listen to them. This is pure sensibility. This is a (dark) brilliant, magnificent, masterpiece.

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