With a straight-forward cover of the classic Jewish celebration song, the A-side of this single bops along through a bass and piano arrangement, while the vocals come together without overpowering the underlying instrumentation. The B-side foregoes the vocals without adding any other instruments, and gives the Italian-sourced music a bit of a rock treatment. Something of an odd pair, but enjoyable nonetheless.
On their third album since debuting in 1990 with It’s a Compton Thang, the MC Eiht-fronted group brings over a dozen tracks of thoroughly confident West Coast rap to bear, with plentiful jazz and funk breaks sampled for back-beats and hooks while Eiht’s verses detail gang-land confrontations and troubles. Keyboards, sax, and harmonica from unofficial member William Zimmerman lend things some extra organic texturing, and while Eiht’s delivery tends to be fairly laid-back, his anger and contempt for competitors come through with clarity.
Though the vocals maintain a steady presence and dominance, the beats are machined so well as to give the lyrics strong competition for attention. Loops, scratches, and vocal sample interjections come thickly-knitted together without getting cluttered, with Zimmerman’s additions smoothing over the seams and enabling some more involved progressions. Steady heat and insistent pressure help keep the album moving at speed, with a lengthy thanks track for cool-down at the end, and the balance and control shown throughout the LP speaks well to the group’s ability to incorporate multiple producers while retaining their own clear style.
Here’s the cover art used for the longbox version.
Murky, discordant, and often agonized, Last Rights would be the last album from Skinny Puppy before the band’s complete disintegration (including the death of member Dwayne Goettel) on 1995′s The Process. With a focus on intensive layering, the songs tend to be virtual morasses of electronic and instrumental samples, with vocalist Nivek Ogre’s rasping, growling, and groaning (apocryphally under the influence of enough drugs to give him in-studio seizures) worming through the audio. Between bouts of harsh noise dissolution, the music drifts into more regulated rhythms, semi-discernible lyrics, and clearer sample sources, until the energy clots back up into further bursts.
But for all of the chaos and intentional disjointedness, the songs of the album flow together remarkably well, with the quick turns and disintegrating structures collapsing smoothly (relatively speaking) into each other. The frequent dives into portions without vocals tend to make it feel more fully-realized, oddly enough, with the final track, “Download” (substituted for the original last track due to sample copyright claims) following that path all the way into a side-band of the same name. While not as memorable in individual tracks as other albums in the group’s catalog, it does come off as an intensely earnest and effort-packed release, one which gels together with more effectiveness than any of their subsequent LPs.
Here’s the alternate cover art.
Another alternate.
And the reissue cover art.
On Danzig’s third album, the band follows their goth blues metal style through heavy riffs, front-man Glenn Danzig’s low-to-mid-pitched howls and growls, and crooning passages of lightness which invariably end up traded back into brooding over women, religion, and/or mortality. Strong drum-work and expressive tone-handling from the guitarist lend the swaggering melodies (usually powered by a sturdy bass-line) a wider range of movement, and the choruses ride a fine line of frequency, occasionally tipping over into a few too many repetitions, but generally fitting the surrounding structures of the songs.
There’s a strong rockabilly flavor to most of the songs, with the slower tempos, stiffer guitar edge, and Satanic gloss being the main points of divergence from that style. And while the lyrics tend to be secondary to the impassioned delivery, the flow and net impact of the songs builds out to a solid overall album, though the title track steals the limelight from the rest.
With their second album, the Norwegian band of Darkthrone made their shift away from the death metal of Soulside Journey and into full-on black metal, with grainy-sounding guitar, fairly fast-paced bass, drums mixed for hardness and penetration over fullness, and vocals which gnash, growl, and howl. Despite the group’s role (alongside their contemporaries) in helping to define black metal’s archetypes for audiences outside the Scandinavian countries, the album goes against and outside those later conventions in some interesting ways.
The lengthiness of its songs (the opening track, “Kathaarian Life Code“, runs over ten minutes, and the shortest, the title track, coming in just under five) is one of the more immediately obvious examples, but the song-writing itself lends further instances, including the willingness to settle into grooves lasting more than ten seconds, slowed smearing of guitar tones, and breakdowns with weight to their direction past just brief build-up.
The punk influence is also much more evident than in a wide cut of black metal bands later in the decade, particularly in the drum-work, and aspects which would be explored further by the band’s followers, such as past-speed-metal savage soloing and the use of acoustic guitar for abrupt counter-point, crop up in quick but intriguing ways. As rough as the guitar buzz makes it seem, the album also comes off as fully realizing its intent, or at least close enough to handily cover up the few fumbles. Dark, harsh, thoroughly aggressive, and fully its own beast.
Here’s the original cover art.
Collecting portions of the scoring provided by Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman (though at least four other composers also contributed to the film), the soundtrack album for The Last of the Mohicans splits the cues from the two into discrete sections, with Jones’ (including “Main Title” and its heavily revisited motif) opening, Edelman’s (covering most of the softer material) following, and a track of quiet bass-pulses and airy vocals by Irish group Clannad capping off the set.
For his part, Jones does an excellent job of combining folk (often of a Gaelic bent) with strong electronic textures (the under-surging bass synths of “The Glade, Part II” being a prime example). And while the progression established in “Main Title” does get run a bit thin over the course of his nine included arrangements, its adaptation through the various energies of the film’s scenes provides a distinctive through-line, matching the fervor of “Fort Battle”, the yearning of “Promentory”, and the swelling grandeur of “Top of the World” without any major lapses in comparable capability.
Edelman’s portion also follows the blending of folk instruments with electronic touch-ups, and while he doesn’t establish any themes as powerful as Jones’ main go-to, his melodies do manage a greater sense of organic growth to their shaping. That may be largely due to Edelman’s coverage of the softer scenes, but his handling of near-incidental moments (e.g., the twangs at the end of a bar in the opening of “River Walk and Discovery”) put him in good light for what arguably boils down to a patch job.
Despite the disparity of its contributors (Edelman was allegedly brought in to score scenes as the film’s editing ran overtime and began conflicting with Jones’ schedule) and the trimness of the soundtrack’s selections in comparison to the full score, the album achieves a richness of emotion and engaging flavor that firmly overcomes its troubled production, making for a rare score as enjoyable on its own as it is in the context of the film.
Scrambled Brains 