3 posts tagged “electro”
It’s Friday, and time for a new feature here on The New Pollution (and, hopefully, the music groups that I also post to): The Friday Fivehead—five quick reviews of albums so awesome they will knock your hairline back a few inches! Some of the music will, naturally, be brand new, hot-off-the-skillet fare, but you can expect me to throw in some forgotten, overlooked, or otherwise “old” jams as well, ’cause sometimes y’all just needs to be reminded just how damned awesome some older music is. Hey, maybe you missed it your first time through, or you’re a youngster who needs some educatin’. At any rate, enough of the preliminary jibba-jabba: let’s get shakin’ here, peeps.
(The) Buggles‘ first album The Age of Plastic came out in 1980. Twentyeight years ago. Almost three decades. And yet…even today, in 2008, this album still sounds remarkably futuristic. And it’s not because of the futuristic, science-fictional bent of the lyrics (most notable in songs like “The Plastic Age”, “I Love You Miss Robot”, and “Johnny On The Monorail”). Even though the music on The Age of Plastic features perfectly average late-20th-Century instruments like guitars, acoustic drums, and of course oldskool analog synths that you could hear featured prominently on many a rock, pop, post-punk, or even “easy listening” album in 1980, the songs’ arrangements by certifiable musical genius Trevor Horn (who seems to be able to turn any musical project he touches into gold [see Yes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Seal, and, of course, The Art of Noise]) and occasional-collaborator Bruce Woolley give them a catchy, pop-inflected, but eerie and almost alienating strangeness that conjures images of gleaming skyscrapers, robot maids, flying cars, and silver spacesuits even while the songs have you bouncing and bopping around. This album is like an artifact from the post-Singularity future; it’s as if Trevor Horn wrote this album sometime in 2061, awash in amazing technology but wistful and nostalgic for the music of the 1980s…so in 2061 he wrote a retro-pop album that somehow made its way back in time to give us a glimpse of a transcendental future full of awesome rockamaroll!
Don Turbolento is one of the best bands I’ve ever discovered via MySpace…a site which I just love to hate, even as it A) provides my music with a means of reaching more and more fans and B) exposes me everyday to more and more great music. DT is a two-man electro firestorm from Italy, so chances are, you probably won’t be seeing them live anytime soon if you live in the States and…well, one must go through less-than-scrupulous means to secure their debut self-titled album. But holy crap, do it! Minimal analog synths bounce along over skittering, scattering—but always danceable—live drums while Dario Bertolotti’s pure, unadulterated post-punk vocals stab through to set off neon bursts of New Wave dynamite under your ass. This is an album aimed at both electro and post-punk fans alike, and its aim is simple and almost religiously pure: to provide you with powerful synth-driven dance-punk that will keep your dancefloors sparkling and your computer speakers glittering. Their music is smooth, yet rough-edged and jittery; polished, yet abrasive at times and slightly rusty around the joins. This album is, in fact, the very definition of modern retro: an honest attempt to produce something that sounds like it should’ve come out in 1978…and goddamn does Don Turbolento do a superior job of doing so! Stuff the “retro is so over” attitude up your arses, hipsters, and just dance and be glad that there are bands like this producing such great dance music for you. Otherwise, what would you be doing? Listening to emo?
Does It Offend You, Yeah? is one of those simply ca-razy bands like Holy Fuck that just sound like a full-on electropunk freak-out. You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Into, their first album after a number of singles that only hinted at the depths of snarly power they could pump out, is chock full of great, high-energy jams that manage to marry the low-brow snottiness of classic ’70s punk with experimental electronic music in such a way the entire album sizzles with electricity and attitude. The band’s name is perfectly chosen. This is a seriously in-your-face musical effort that very well could offend electronic and punk purists. GOOD FOR ‘EM. Anyone who finds him- or herself so wrapped up in issues of genre purity needs punched in the teeth. Does It Offend You, Yeah? is so full of crossover craziness that they’re damnear impossible to define, but comparisons with The Automatics and Enon are probably spot on. DIOY,Y? is a thousand times more confrontational that anyone else, though; this record blasts out of your speakers like an army of Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers full of beer and looking for a good damn time that might destroy your livingroom.
Infadels debut album We Are Not the Infadels proves that yes, the Infadels really are all they’re cracked up to be. Equal parts britpop, dance-punk, and glam-rock, Infadels sounds a bit like a more British, more New Wave-oriented Scissor Sisters with a more electronic feel and an Oasis-like bad attitude. The lead song on the album, “Love Like Semtex,” sounds like classic Duran Duran mixed with The Soup Dragons and The Faint. If you like your dance music melodic, catchy, and complex but still extremely easy to bounce to, then We Are Not the Infadels is the album for you. If Don Tubolento and Does It Offend You, Yeah? are a little too hard-edged for you, but you still like that New Wavey guitars-and-synthesizers dance sound, then Infadels will definitely satisfy. The album is smoking hot and full of energy from track 1 through track 11, with only one mysterious lull (”1′20″) to give you a second to relax before we’re back to the rockamaroll. Highly recommended.
And finally, venerable ol’ Snoop Doggity Dogg, the ol’ D-O-Double-G Himself is back with his ninth—NINTH, people!—album Ego Trippin. So what can you expect? Songs about bitches? Check. Songs about makin’ money? Check. Songs about being a bad-ass? Chickity-check. Songs soaked in the influence of late ’70s and early ’80s synth-funk goodness clearly inspired by and derived from The Gap Band (Charlie Wilson appears all over the album, again, as usual) and Prince, etc.? CHIZZECK! A country song dedicated to Johnny Cash that’s all about smokin’ reefer? Ch…What?! You heard me. “My Medicine” is a 100% country song. And it comes right in the middle of standard hiphop monster jams as “Staxxx in My Jeans”, “Ridin’ In My Chevy”, “Deez Hollywood Nights”, and the sensual dancefloor-destroying lead single, “Sensual Seduction/Sexual Eruption” (depending on whether you have the “explicit” or “clean” versions)*. Nonetheless, this record represents a much softer side of Snoop than the straight-up gangsta attitude of The Blue Carpet Treatment. This is an album by a man who is maturing despite the fact that he’s still pumping out swaggering numberings to keep his fans happy. The final three tracks, the incredibly heartfelt tribute to his wife “Once Chance (Make It Good)”, the heartwrenching soul anthem “Why Did You Leave Me” (which literally sounds like an updated Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes song), and the stirring Hood tribute “Can’t Say Goodbye” really show that Snoop could be making some very, very touching music if only he could permanently say goodbye to his gangsta side and all those who expect that from him and just write an album 100% from his real man’s heart. It would be something special to hear.
*And may I take a moment to say that “Sensual Seduction” actually sounds better than “Sexual Eruption.” The suggestive, but not blatant lyrics, work better with the ’80s feel of the song. The more sexually-explicit lyrics actually sound anachronistic. It’s almost like expecting to be listening to a Levert song and hearing Gerald Levert say, “I got a bad bitch wit’ me every day of the week.” It’s jarring, almost!
So that’s it, folks. The first Friday Fivehead is in the can…even though I actually just published it at 1:25am on Saturday morning. Come on, yo—I was playing D&D all day and buying my girlfriend a birthday present! Nonetheless, I bet you know what I was listening to all day as I was doing that stuff!
See you next week with even more jams and, before that, a thorough appreciation of power-metal masterminds Dragonforce! Keep your heads ringing, people. Peace!
Ladies, Gentlemen, *humans of all species and/or version numbers, Machine Intelligences! The Spacing Guild Guide to Good Music is proud--nay, thrilled!--to bring to you, courtesy of our brethren at Mutant Sounds, a Totally Booty-rockin' Electro Jam from 1970s Italy--"Droid", by Automat! (Make click to the left to experience the specialness!)
Here's a brief description of Automat blatantly stolen from Mutant Sounds:
Their 1978 album is a rather unique example of instrumental electronic music from Italy, totally built on synthesized sounds and rhythms, it's in the same rank as contemporary works by Kraftwerk and Jean Michel Jarre, whose Oxygene was recorded in the same period and released just a few months before this, so it can be an interesting surprise for fans of this musical style.Side A is totally taken by the long Automat suite by Claudio Gizzi, while the B side contains three shorter tracks by Musumarra. One of these, Droid, was a leading theme on the brazilian Globo TV.
The album art, viewable on the Mutant Sounds page linked above, depicts a pastel android peering at his own very human reflection, Narcissus-like, in a pool of water--but when I listen to the track "Droid", I can't help but envision a classical, Golden-Age metal man storming through a vast factory full of lasers shining through banks of mist, followed by an army of humans in tight-fitting jumpsuits, newly freed from servitude to the evil Machine Lords, as plasma bolts shoot through the air with analog BEEYOO BEEYOO sounds. Very Battlestar Gallactica meets Logan's Run, with perhaps a little Zardoz thrown in--I mean, one can never go wrong with a strapping silver droid in a bright scarlet banana hammock!
This post marks a first for TSGGtGM, as well--our first downloadable mp3! We'll be bringing you more out-of-print, hard-to-find goodness in times to come.
Classic Italian zombie films from the 1970s and early 1980s, like Le Notti del Terrore and the Lucio Fulci classic Zombie (aka Zombi II, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Island of the Flesh-Eaters, et cetera), all featured on their soundtracks a very unique style of eerie, suspenseful electronic music that has since influenced many, many electro artists--from John Carpenter, whose seminal films Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Fog (no links for you: if you're not already familiar with Carpenter's work, then shame on you) brought that "zombie sound" to the US, to contemporary Pittsburgh band Zombi, whose work is very explicitly modelled on that interesting little subgenre. Hell, in 2004, Device Electronic Entertainment put out a compilation entitled Disco Undead featuring a variety of contemporary electro acts reinterpreting or rebuilding old Italian horror/sci-fi themes--it's a must-have if you're an Italian-horror/electronic-music freak like myself!
But this article is not about Disco Undead, as great as that comp might be. Instead, I want to focus on one band alone, the somewhat-enigmatic Nightmare Lodge--a prolific Italian electronic group whose music, often scant in the States but a little more accessible on the Continent, is the purest contemporary reincarnation (or, rather, resurrection!) of the Italian zombie-horror sound. And Tentacled is their best collection of representative tracks.
Nightmare Lodge was founded in the late 1980s, and has had a rather storied and involved history full of various members and extended hiatuses during which the sound of band changed greatly. Almost all of the works available by Nightmare Lodge on Amazon.com come from their most recent, and most representative, stage that began in 1984 and involved the release of a "trilogy" of albums in Europe (Negative Planet, Luminescence, and The Enemy Within) as well as an independent movie soundtrack and two unique albums, Blind Miniatures and the aforementioned Tentacled for the now-defunct US label Red Stream. Of all their work, the US releases are by far the best--but, that said, Tentacled greatly outweighs Blind Miniatures in interest simply because Tentacled is, quite literally, the perfect soundtrack for the horror movie that lives in your head.
All horror afficionados have a special, personal "film" of sort that exists only within their minds--an idealized compilation of favorite scenes, moments, monsters and murders sewn together into a mental Frankenstein which the horror devotee can reflect upon and use as a means of judging other films...and, quite often, the music used in those films. Some talented folks, like John Carpenter, Clive Barker, and Rob Zombie, have managed to bring their inner films forth from their skulls fullyformed like Athena from the mind of Zeus; and many more have simply used their inner films to fuel hundreds of late-night, coffee-fueled discussions of which Nightmare on Elm Street was the best* or who portrayed the best Dracula**. Whether you share it or not, it's in there, being projected all the time on the inside of your skull like a classic highlights reel at a neural drive-in.
And, of course, what is a film without a soundtrack? Depending on your preferences in music, the soundtrack could be anything from Bach concertos to righteous, headbangin' Iron Maiden jams, samples from other classic horror soundtracks (the scores to Bram Stoker's Dracula and John Carpenter's The Thing are perennial favorites of mine) to horrorcore hiphop. Or eerie, but melodic, and almost wistful, minimalistic electronic soundscapes of the kind that graced the backdrop of Fulci's flesh-rotting masterpieces and have been reborn so wonderfully on Nightmare Lodge's Tentacled.
Don't expect crunchy metallic noises, monstrous bass, or sampled screams here. This isn't Skinny Puppy, after all! Nightmare Lodge is just flatout eerie. The first track on Tentacled, "God's Mastication", is a surprisingly pretty, yet certainly creepy little piece built from a slightly-grungy trip-hop beat, a heavy oscillating bassline, blippity synths and lush (I use that word a lot, don't I?) strings that come together in a very large, ambient space that liberally soaks the song in reverb--and creates an atmosphere of clammy Hammer-Films-soundtrack dread. "Placenta Permiable" is a bizarre number constructed from a solid, danceable electro beat, glockenspiel sounds, glassy synths, heavy bass drones...and what sounds like a vocal sample of some drunken Italian woman trying to recite an Evil Spell phonetically. It's a bit of a letdown after "God's Mastication", but a dip in the road is nothing disastrous, as immediately following we have the absolutely brilliant "Ice Skin #4"--a beatless, but very rhythmic piece of melodic ambient full of analog-synth goodness. THIS track is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the closest on the album to anything from an Italian horror flick...especially when the mutated, muted vocal samples and the very sparse percussion and the squealing strings come in during the middle lull. As the synths slowly disassemble themselves into quarter-notes and echoes, and random trills of piano appear, you can practically feel the frost collecting on your dead skin, a gritty grey layer rising in spiky little rills from pale blue flesh.
My favorite track on the album, though, is definitely the fourth: "Lovers: Two Bodies in A Space Version". This song is remarkably simple: Little more than a plodding bassline, some synth harpsichord melodies, and a very mod fake-thereminh lead swirling over everything like a cold white mist. A nice, bassy electro beat emerges from the featureless whiteness soon enough and the song takes on dimension, suggesting thoughts of stiff white mannekins approaching one another in an all-white room...rather like something from that little-known George Lucas classic, THX-1138. Though it's a very structured song, assembled from perfectly-electronic regular patterns of notes, it still has an abstract feel to it, as though it were a piece written for a very minimal modern-art installation. Also, though it's a rather minimal song itself, it has a very dense feel--especially when the crunchy final breakbeat comes in. The song is an auditory paradox, and therein lies the brilliance of its composition and production.
"Mirage IV" is also a bit of a conundrum: a straightforward dance song--not a surreal ambient jam as the title suggests. It's quite reminiscent of Enigma with its deep bassline and its thoroughly-average techno beat...but the instrumentation laid out like strangely-colored animal hides upon that framework is something else entirely. If "God's Mastication" provides the title track for the horror in your head, "Ice Skin" the atmospheric bed for a haunting, and "Lovers" a moment of unreal dreaming, "Mirage IV" will accent the chase scene in which the hybrid fish-people are chasing the protagonist through town. This is the kind of awesome dual-purpose track that works in clubs and in the privacy of one's own filthy, haunted home.
The remaining tracks are all equally as interesting as well, and if my brief description of those above has piqued your interest, by all means seek out this highly-underrated, but beautifully done, little gem. Especially if you are a Lovecraftian freak like myself. It would only make sense that an album entitled Tentacled would work well with the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, but I'm still a bit surprised at how well this album works as background music to the stories "The Call of Cthulhu" (naturally), "Cold Air", and "The Shadow Out of Time". They provide a wonderful Carpenterian bed of sound upon which can play the horrific imagery of R'lyeh rising from the depths and the formless spawn creeping through mysterious Australian ruins.
*If you say anything other than the first, you are no friend of mine. Leave your scene cred in the circular file by the door as you leave!
**Bela Lugosi. The end. Although, even I must admit that Christopher Lee was pretty damn cool, too....
