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Depeche
Mode
Singles
86-98
Mute
It's
difficult to say why Depeche Mode compilations are necessary and even more
difficult to say why they're successful, since virtually everyone listened
to Depeche Mode while in high school. It's always fun stuff, but there's
little on this double album that's new. The new track "Only When I Lose
Myself," is certainly an excellent song, possibly one of Mode's best ballads,
and the compilation's digital remastering cleans up a lot of the low-end
muddiness of earlier albums. But does it justify a $20 double-CD set? Depeche
Mode fans would say yes for completeness reasons. Non-fans would find this
a good overview of Mode's history.
Casual
fans? Well, surprisingly enough there is a point after all. While the music
is all already available, unless you sit and listen to all the albums in
order for a weekend, you're not going to hear the progressive development
of the seminal electronic band of the '80s and '90s. It's fascinating to
hear the gradual transitions from noise-worshiping S&M glammers to
electro-rock stadum-fillers, finally to laid-back electro-groove merchants.
Earlier songs contain strains of what was to come; later songs display
lessons learned from earlier tracks. Also notable is the abuse Dave Gahan's
voice takes over the years as his much-publicised heroin addiction worsens
- the smooth post-addiction crooning typifying the recent works comes as
quite a shock.
Greatest
hits collections often sound a death knell for a band, or more often are
used as a posthumous attempt to rekindle interest in a long-forgotten artist.
This is hardly true for Mode, since this is now their second greatest hits
package, and they still manage to sell out stadium venues and send albums
multiplatinum. Singles 86-98 is an excellent compendium of the music
that has brought them from '80s cult success to '90s legend status.
Eric
Oehler
The
Pastels
Illuminati
Up!
Remix
albums are a dicey proposition, what with all the potential pitfalls along
the way: Unhappy artists, unhappy fans, lack of continuity, and don't forget
the ridiculous sums of money some remix artists command. It comes as a
bit of a surprise, then that Scottish indie stalwarts The Pastels would
assign the the bulk of the songs off their 1997 album, Illuminated
to fifteen different remix artists and use the results to fashion another
full-length, as Illuminated was an only-slightly-better-than-average
pop album to begin with.
No
matter. The knob twiddlers on Illuminati have taken a slew of unremarkable,
but still better than average tunes and created a remarkable album. Illuminati
features sixteen tracks (twelve songs, as some are remixed more than once)
reconstructed by fifteen different artists. What's amazing is that each
artist assumes complete ownership of the song - it's easy to recognize
Stereolab's hand in "One Wild Moment" or My Bloody Valentine's in "Cycle."
- yet the album holds together exceptionally well, maintaining a cohesiveness
seldom found on this type of fare.
That
cohesiveness revolves around well-constructed, mainly-electronic rhythms
and percussive loops. Add to that the occasional watery-sounding analogue
keyboard sounds that flit in and out of the mixture, and you have a formula
for what will end up as one of the better remix albums of the year. The
fluidity of the rhythmic loops and analogue sounds complement The Pastels'
flawed-but-pleasant vocals nicely.
Nearly
every song on this compilation soars, though The Pastels' vocalists' occasional
tunelessness does detract from a few of the songs. We could have done without
Steven's singing on Future Pilot AKA's version of "Rough Riders." Oddly,
the Make-Up's take on the same song is nothing short of amazing, sounding
like a duet between a hungover Robert Smith and a vertigo-stricken Suzanne
Vega. Stereolab turn "One Wild Moment" into a bizarre dancefloor bleep-a-thon,
and both Cinema and John McEntire (of Tortoise fame) lend a distinctly
noir-ish flair to "Remote Climbs."
Standout
tracks include the aforementioned Stereolab, Make-Up and John McEntire
tracks. My Bloody Valentine, the only artist on the compilation with two
remixes, gives "Cycle" a wonderful re-working. In addition, namedropped-by-Krautrock-hipsters
To Rococo Rot toss their hat into the ring with a low-key, shimmering treatment
of "Thomson Colour."
Shimmering
pretty much describes Illuminati at its best. It's a gorgeous, radiant
album, which showcases the talents of thirteen different artists and manages
not to sound like it came free with a magazine. Those looking for the year's
dreamiest electronic album may as well stop here.
-Eric
Wittmershaus
Love
and Rockets
Lift
Red
Ant
The
past few months have been quite good to the former members of the proto-goth
band Bauhaus. Their first reunion concert sold out in record time, a sucessful
reunion tour followed, old hatchets got buried, and both frontman Peter
Murphy and the remaining three (collectively known as Love and Rockets)
released new material.
The
first of these releases is Love and Rockets' Lift. After scoring
a huge hit on the alternative charts with 1990's "So Alive," their subsequent
releases have been spotty at best. Hot Trip to Heaven was an interesting
experiment with heavy ambient electronics, but it contained little that
fans could latch on to. Their followup album, delayed by a studio fire
that destroyed their equipment and master tapes, was a return to their
more tradional guitar-band sound, but wasn't especially new and came as
too little, too late.
Lift
is what both albums should have been: halfway in between. While not a perfect
album, it sucessfully marries churning dancefloor-style electronics with
Daniel Ash's atmospheric guitarwork and the Haskins brothers' solid rhythm
lines. It's the sort of album that early '90s dancefloor-britpop mavens
like EMF or Jesus Jones would be making today if they hadn't vanished into
obscurity.
The
tracks that stand out the most are the single-ready "Holy Fool," featuring
members of Luscious Jackson, and the nearly-industrial "RIP 20C." "Holy
Fool" is a compelling fusion of trip-hop rhythms, nicely crunchy guitars,
house-style diva vocal wails, and a ironic pop-vocal of the type that drove
"So Alive." "Rip 20C" is a somewhat goofy recitation of as many modern
acronyms as someone outside the computer industry can conjure, distorted
and layered over a screeching synth and chunky beat.
Not
every track is a winner. The title track is somewhat nondescript, and there's
a tendency for some of the tracks to meander between styles instead of
fusing them. Still, if this is indactive of a new, solid direction for
Love And Rockets, then they have definite potential for a re-emergence
into the danceclub scene, if not the pop-radio market.
Eric
Oehler
Peter
Murphy
Recall
EP
Red
Ant
Like
his former-now-current-again bandmates in Love And Rockets, Peter Murphy's
career has been somewhat checkered. After a shaky post-Bauhaus debut and
a brilliant but underrated American label debut, he scored a huge hit on
the alternative charts in 1990 with "Cuts You Up." The followup album was
a nice enough collection of introspective songs but was about a year too
long in the making and was overshadowed by a complete change in the "alternative"
music market. 1995's Cascade was a mixture of AOR-ballads and alt-rock
anthems, and marked the beginning of Murphy's experimentation with electronic-driven
pop songs. While these experiments were occasionally of spotty quality,
they hinted at a few interesting ideas.
Then
a few things happened...Murphy's 10-year collaboration with songwriter
Paul Statham came to an end, his record contract ended, he permanently
moved to Turkey, and finally caved in and reformed Bauhaus. The fallout
from this resulted in a new contract with a new independent label, a new
group of collaborators (KMFDM's Sascha Konietzko and Tim Skold and Ministry's
Bill Rieflin) and a whole slew of new musical and lyrical influences. The
Recall
EP is the first product of this change in routine and is about as different
from previous Murphy material as that material was from the Bauhaus gloom-rock
scene.
Recorded
in six days in KMFDM's studio and featuring heavy electronics and layered
beats, Recall provides a lot of new energy to Murphy's operatic
baritone. Two of the tracks on the album are remakes of older material,
although neither bears much resemblance to its predecessor. The new tracks,
"Big Love of a Tiny Fool" and "Surrendered" are both densely arranged pop
songs tinged with pop-industrial electronic sensibilities. "Surrendered"
nearly drowns in Islamic lyrical imagery, but when coupled with the spine-tingling
vocals of a Turkish guest singer, the lyrics seem more relevant to the
actual song. "Big Love" has very pleasing melody although the backing tracks
rely pretty much on a looped phrase to propel them. The final track is
an acoustic version of "Big Love" that relies on the melody and seems to
have more of a sense of purpose without the loping backbeat.
A nice
teaser for the upcoming full-length album.
Eric
Oehler
Hooverphonic
Blue
Wonder Power Milk
Sony
"It's
time to get radio play!"
This
is not a rallying cry that usually proceeds a great record, and, sadly,
it lingers over Blue Wonder Power Milk like a fog. When Hooverphonic
burst onto the international music scene, it was a group that understood
the beauty of the trip-hop aesthetic; its tracks were subtle, strange and
skilled combinations of dark electronic music, samples, and sweet female
vocal work.
While
the music from Hooverphonic's latest effort has a pop-inflected drum 'n'
bass sparkle to it, it seems as though the group has taken a definite step
away from the complicated and almost alien musical sensibility that made
A
New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular such a pleasant surprise in 1996.
What
emerges is an album considerably less layered, less moody and less edgy
than the group‚s previous efforts. Lyrics are more intelligible, and a
general lack of mystery pervades the album; the music is shiny, comfortable
and flat.
Tracks
that diverge from the formula are not necessarily any more successful.While
somewhat darker, "Dictionary's" lyrics are moody and simplistic, and the
resulting product is amusingly reminiscent of vintage Depeche Mode. Hooverphonic
also manages to really drop the ball on "This Strange Effect" which features
lyrics as follows:
you've
got this strange effect on me
and
I like it
you've
got this strange effect on me
and
I like it
you
make my world seem right
you
make my darkness bright, (oh yes)
you've
got this strange effect on me
and
I like it
and
I like it
(repeat)
Not
good.
While
there are some definite high points to the album (the horn loop on "Eden"
and the pleasantly hypnotic "Out of Tune" come to mind immediately) listeners
who enjoy depth and challenge are strongly urged to pick up A New Stereophonic
Sound Spectacular and give Blue Wonder Power Milk a miss.
-James
Norton
Talvin
Singh
OK
Island
Walk
up to a music critic and say "techno" (or one of the million derivative
terms) and you will more than likely get some response about media overhype,
lifeless dance music, and faceless knob-twiddlers. Say "Indian Music" to
the same critic, and you'll be flung into a spiel about raggas, hippie
culture, and the failed promise of Indian-crossover britpop bands.
But
what if the two met somewhere in the middle? A best-of-both-worlds scenario?
You'd
end up with Talvin Singh's OK, a truly stellar debut.
Singh's
talent as a DJ and producer is somewhat legendary on the underground club
scene, having produced the genre-bending Anhoka: Sounds of the Asian
Underground compilation and arranged Bjork's Debut. On his own,
he demonstrates a wide range of talents in production, writing, and performance.
Many artists that try to cross genres, especially international ones, tend
to either water down the world influences or lose themselves in thier own
cleverness (the only artist who's managed to consistently do it well is
Peter Gabriel). Singh, however, knows his sources extrememly well, having
learned Indian music at his grandmother's knees ("his first tablas" say
the liner notes) and having been steeped in the techno club culture of
London. Songs like "Sutrix" display explosive ethnic percussion and vocals,
all layered seamlessly with a compelling dance beat. The epic opening track,
"Traveller," begins with an acid-jazz incantation from the vocalist from
LTJ Bukem, and over the course of thirteen minutes morphs across the Asian
continent with the main themes being carried by synthesizers, vocalists,
and finally the Madras Symphony Orchestra. It's a colossal undertaking
th at amazingly doesn't collapse under its own weight.
Thrown
in for good measure are other Asian influences. Japanese electro-maven
Ryuichi Sakamoto contributes flute to a track, an Okinawan choir lends
vocals to another, and a parade of Asian guest musicians dot the lineup.
Influences range from Jungle to Dub to Indian Classical to American Jazz,
often within one track.
To
be fair, a few tracks don't work. "Mombasstic" is interesting, but seems
to meander a bit. "Decca" is cute, with a faux-Kama Sutra reading, but
it doesn't really stand up to repeated listenings. The rest of the tracks,
however, are simply without parallel.
Get
this album. Get it now.
-Eric
Oehler |
