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Buyer Rating: 100.0% positive (6 ratings)

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No Artist - Super Bikes Vol 2 - 23-Feb-07 09:28 AM
How do you comment about a release that consists entirely of motorbike engine sounds? It's not exactly something you'd put on your stereo for the long drive home through peak hour traffic (unless you want to fool passers by that there's something BIG lurking under the bonnet of your mini when in fact it's merely your stereo)...
Seriously though, from a technical point of view (for what it is) it is ok. The quality of the recordings is excellent, with no interference, background noises or notable variation in volume. The bike humming lasts for maybe thirty or so seconds a piece and you get to hear the engines idling and being gunned.
Maybe true biker freaks would get a kick out of this - I've heard at least one Harley lover express his melancholic love for that deep, rumbling bass sound every time one flies past. For the rest of us though, this passes for a decent collection of field (highway?) recordings and is no doubt itching to be played in conjunction with just about any song ever written about motorbikes, riding, cruising and highways.

New Peculiars, The - The 'Futurismo' EP - 30-Jan-07 04:19 PM
A strange record, making it particularly difficult to describe (who was it that said something along the lines that writing about music is like dancing to architecture, or some such). So here goes...
The sound is cacophonous, screachy, chaotic and "loose" (in that it's not completely random). The instruments are not distorted per see but are seemingly out of tune. It's as if an orchestra is all going at once, every player doing their own thing, and yet there is some strange vaguely ordered general direction amongst it all.
A1 is a forward direction (ie not altogether random) collection of clashing instruments, with the screaches of strings merging with a deranged flow of thin beats, lead by bizarre lyricless vocals that have the emotion and feel of a mad circus announcer.
A2 consists of musical cascades, all the instruments clashing ahead at the same time - try to imagine King Crimson being played by a possessed elementary school band.
B1 is an eerie run of beehive buzzing drones – nothing like the first two tracks. It has some vague-touching-the-microphone scratchy thuds underlying it.
B2 is the most confronting track on the record, where the string instruments are bashed and tortured to such an extent that they could almost pass as animal or human brays and groans. The effect is seriously creepy at first though one eventually becomes accustomed to it.
All in all, this is damn fine experimental music, to say the least. Only the recording quality is let down, but I secretly suspect that an improvement would take away from its charm.

Gospel Of The Horns - Monuments Of Impurity - 30-Jan-07 09:43 AM
Averag so-so old school sounding release that invokes the words primitive, barbaric and clichéd, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing with this kind of music…
A1 is the highlight. Thin drums (you can barely hear the snares) which somehow give it a simpler, almost Germanic tribal drumming feel. There’s the mandatory growly vocals, which are a little less screetchy than the usual black metal dosage. There’s thrashable time changes, although they’re predictable and the tempo never takes off into hyperspace. The guitars are heavy as, with simple but oh so headbanging riffs and some simple backing very-80s guitar fiddleydiddleing to boot. Unfortunately, the primitive sound that somehow works for the drums does not seem to work for the guitars, giving them a feeble presence.
B1 is a simple would-be-thrash anthem, the sort you could hold a Steiner in the air to whilst simultaneously cursing those pesky Christians (or your enemies… or whoever). It’s a simple repetitive riff with typically blasphemous lyrics on top. There’s also a short and quite good thrash metal solo somewhere in the middle, but it’s lost in the poor production.
B2 is an instrumental, totally in the vein of old school 80s death and thrash. Hardly original but definitely one to appeal to the legions of wrinkly leather jacket wearing warriors of old, with fast strumming guitars, rolling drums, and a no doubt irresistible windmilling effect if this were done live.
All in all, a release that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, and which is let down by some crappy production (though there’s always a strong extreme music contingent that argues that this is the way it should be).

Bros - Drop The Boy - 16-Jan-07 06:43 AM
Unimaginably annoying and yet insidiously catchy remnant from the 80s.
Listening to this retrospectively – at an extremely young age, “Drop The Boy” was one of the first pieces of music I ever got into that was not actual children’s music – I was struck by how well produced this was. Nowadays of course, this kind of thing is considered laughable, but these guys were IT back then.
Side A is just that track, with some vague homoerotic lyrical undertones (and let’s not go into Bros’ clean cut and super smooth accompanying image…), at a chugging 88 bpm (according to my mixer) that would most likely have brought out the best and worst of dance moves in discos across Europe – and all along, you can cringe along to the faux manly vocals, the sort that our contemporary Robbie is capable of and these guys were not. Yes, this song was about as “boy band” as you could possibly get, even if there were only two or three of them at any time.
Side B “The Boy Dropped” is a piano driven reinterpretation of the same track, most likely a sequel, though I can barely bring myself to listen to it more than twice on account of the singer’s spine tinglingly irritating attempts at sounding – or most likely, being – Michael Jackson. At least Wacko Jacko was kinda cool back then but this doesn’t do them any favours.
By far the greatest value in this product lies in its potential for being used in conjunction with other deviant music – perhaps some crazy breakcore or twisted drum n’ bass would do the trick, or any other music that hovers at a chugging 88 or 170+ bpm. Since the pressing appears to be rather poor (quite thin and a little too flexible) this is something where an eighties CD compilation is guaranteed to be better… unless of course you happen to be a closeted Bros fan and you desperately want the B side, in which case there’s obviously something wrong with you…

Iggy Pop - Real Wild Child (Wild One) - 07-Jan-07 05:57 AM
How do you judge an all time classic? There's no denying that "Real Wild Child (Wild One)" is one of those fantastic tracks that will always be cooler than so much of the bollocks that emerged from the eighties.
Even so, although we are talking about only 3 tracks here, this release is a little disappointing. The A side, an 8.28 epic extended remix from the days where "extended" usually meant not too much more than lengthening the intro and outro, comes across as waaay too long. Even when considering the technology of 1986 I thought this was excessive. Yes, there are some interesting effects (e.g. Iggy's lyrical "stutter", which is done ad nauseum). They are rudimentary by today's standards but they may have been interesting or exciting back then. Even so I felt it dragged after the first few minutes.
B1 is undisputably the reason for obtaining this. The original, true 80s pop rock at a standard 3.37 minutes, perfect for radio play and all that. Comparatively tame lyrics about the follies of youth and the motives for being cool and wild, conveyed in poignantly honest and simple language. I will never forget the scene in the film "Crocodile Dundee II" where Mick Dundee somehow convinces a (very cheesy 80s Hollywood interpretation of a) NY Gang to accompany him on a raid on a drug dealer’s home. With a wide shot of a bravado-filled convoy of gang member cars sailing through New York City, collecting more of their kind along the way, the preceding song said it all.
B2 - "Little Miss Emperor" - a real B side by definition, is nothing overly special. It has that softer/popular almost Bowie-esque rock sound (Bowie was after all one of the producers), though it does give the listener a chance to hear Iggy's gruffer vocals, a nice comparison compared to the super smooth and processed "Real Wiiiild Child".

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