On his first solo album, Fuzz Townshend turns out a blend of breakbeat, reggae, alternative rock, and a little bit of jazz, with the beat-driven stew sloshing about in a generally upbeat fashion. For the most part, the songs are built around following a given groove or riff, without much in the way of clever structuring, and development of the track tends to go the way of slipping down a break or reiterating with a few more layers slapped onto the cycle. The loops tend to be fairly fun and stylish, though, with a vibe that’s clear and crisp without being over-polished, and while that’s not enough to make up for the shallow arrangements, it does make for easier listening. Neat enough for a diversion, but the flitty songs end up making it feel like an unfinished album.
Opening with a wishful litany of fatal bad luck (”I Hope You Die”), and continuing on through songs about vaginas, being a loser, breasts, what would be done with godlike powers, and blowjobs (cunnilingus having been covered in the previous album’s “Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny”), the Bloodhound Gang’s biggest album revels in juvenalia and pop culture references (e.g., “One thumb in Pulse of the Nation / One thumb in your girlfriend’s ass”), building verses around name-drops and a deep well of sexual phrases, euphemistic and not.
With song sounds ranging from Homer Simpson yelling “Holy macaroni!” on repeat, through a looped lift of the opening guitar riff of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” dovetailing into the chorus of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax”, to a phone-call between the song-writer and his mother on the topic of “words that rhyme with vagina,” (part of a song [”Three Point One Four”] which ends with the word “vagina” sung in falsetto eight times in a row), the album is packed with samples. But the band supplies their own instrumental material where necessary, whether than entails hiring a pair of professional vocalists just to record them singing “Recognize!” and “How do you let someone know if your hotcakes are selling well?”, crunching out a bass riff, or letting DJ Q-Ball take off with some turntable scratching.
Unfortunately, much of the non-sampled musical components, including keyboards, drums, and bass, end up sounding weirdly muddy in the mixing, an odd quality in a record which otherwise evidences so much attention to the production work. And while the group shows an impressive way with crafting hooks and accelerating vocal flow (the latter especially shows in “Right Turn Clyde”), the lyrics (e.g., “All in all / You’re just another dick with no balls / balls / balls / balls” or
“Got shot down / Like Larry Flynt / Felt like shit / Like a bowel movement”) could only be sung along to without embarrassment by those with a middle-school mind-set or superb sound-proofing
With a redneck monologue about truck stop sex set to a tinny Casio keyboard loop (”A Lap Dance is So Much Better when the Stripper is Crying”) finishing out the album before a glammy hard rock cover of ‘60s pop group The Association’s “Along Comes Mary” leads into a series of recording studio outtakes as the hidden track, the album successfully retains its contrary-minded approach to the shape of a hit album to the end. While the form and style of its break-out hit “The Bad Touch”, with its commingling of sex and pop culture (”Then we’ll do it doggy-style / So we can both watch X-Files”) gives a good general idea of the larger album’s shaping, the persistent weirdness (due in no small part to the undercurrent of near-nihilistic lethargy and ambivalence in the face of giddy sophomorism) delivers something a bit off in its aftertaste. At the same time, it’s an excellent snapshot of the American mind-set immediately preceding the 21st century, when something so gleefully profane could be such a big hit.
On I-Cue’s only album besides his ‘96 Twisted & Funky mix, the producer/DJ unpacks a batch of cut-together beats and clean-drop samples, with guests popping in on a couple of tracks to provide original raps. Mellow grounding lets the more active cut-work operate without getting too unhinged, and the guest tracks mesh easily with those built around sampled vocals, giving the whole album a smooth flow and an air of coolness even at its highest speeds.
The turntablism doesn’t pull anything too wild, but the incorporation of drum’n’bass with the hip-hop backing leads to some very flavorful moments and a blend that was still fairly uncommon for the time of its release, as does the leaning into spacier compositions in other sections. Occasional drifts into jazz loops show I-Cue’s facility with making more common stylings sound good, and the variety comes off as
well-rounded instead of scattered, making it all the more disappointing that a full follow-up never emerged.
The base mix of the title track opens this single with a quick jump into techno with a jazz gilding, jamming together wandering synth pings with a slick but spartan bass-line, throwing out occasional sampled renderings of the title phrase while upping the beat accompaniment. Surging under-pumps of mid-range swerve tones build up, drop out, then return at higher pitch and faster concentration, activating the title sample more and more to match, before fading down to a beat and wave exit.
“Playing With Lightning (Scratcher’s Delight mix)” follows, providing a thorough reworking of the original track into pounding bass kicks, replaced bridges, and a transplant of the main scratching passage. It’s not bad, but outside of the high-pitched bridging ostinato on synth, it’s so different from the original song as to be a bit jarring. The opening track returns in a remix by Dynamix II to open the B-side, emphasizing the drum machines against an up-and-down synth roll, translating into jittery vocal sample manipulation and pitch-up eruptions, and slipping more completely into straight-on techno, though it retains the off-center touch
Lastly comes “Children of the Earth”, an exclusive track, with a slow-roll bass kick riff complemented by more active (to near-frenzy) high-pitched synth activity, bouncing along on firm beat support until reaching the slide-out finish. A very strong pack of instrumental electronic work, with a wonderful balance of experimentation and fundamentals.
Collecting tracks from an EP, a mini-album, a multi-band J-punk compilation, and a handful of live shows, this CD (which, like all of the band’s albums, is self-titled) shows off the early-’80s punk of Japanese group Aburadako, without polishing up the roughness for its revisited presentation. Moving fast and banging loudly, the short songs take the rawness of their UK-based inspirations to higher levels of intensity, aggression, and abrasiveness, with the rasping yells of the vocalist and the lo-fi screeching of the guitar at times seeming to foreshadow black metal. Elsewhere, the band plays with mockingly slow and low-pitched tunings and moans, though it’s unclear whether it was intended to keep breaking expectations, or if Aburadako just liked the way it sounded.
The group pulls an impressive range out of their standard bass/drums/guitar/vocals set-up, even more so considering that the compilation only covers their first two years of output, and the experimentation they use in stringing together wildly disparate passages speaks to the group’s musical abilities beyond their skills at emulating and amplifying the styles of UK punk. The doomy cuts, like “OUT OF THE BODY”, feel even more ahead of their time than the hyper-violent ones, but all around, it’s a striking set of introductory material from a band which would manage to last for more than two decades after their initial burst.
Here’s the cover art to the 1983 flexi-disc, which doubled as the disc-face design; the mini-album’s cover art was used as the cover to this compilation.
Pulling well-known and obscure base songs from Warp Records’ (at this point) decade-long catalog, this compilation features remix contributors to match, with results including Stereolab remixing Boards of Canada, Plaid remixing Autechre, Oval remixing Squarepusher, and so on for the rest of two CDs. With twenty-six tracks all together, the moods and styles jump all over their respective spectrums; however, despite the available options, Warp plays it safe by leaning on the big names of their stable for multiple base tracks (LFO gets top honors, with three songs to themselves and an opening mix track shared with Aphex Twin).
Chilled grooves are the main flavor, but some hyperactivity is common too, as breaks get jumbled and chopped, synth layers get tangled, and skittery percussion is flipped on and off for embellishment. Through it all, the mixing, production, and engineering maintain an impressively high polish, one which helps join the older material with the new in near-seamless fashion. As such, while the collection offers an interesting cross-section of how the Warp label developed over its first decade of existence, it takes some careful examination to really pull out that information from the mass of material. More obvious (and possibly more informative about Warp’s impact) are the remixers that appear, many of whom come from outside Warp’s usual line-up and signings. Though presented as one big block, it all flows together well, and the selections certainly paint Warp in a good light.
Collecting several of the singles from the first few years of Warp Records’ catalog, and presenting them in order of their positions in the label’s catalog numbers (not always matching up directly with actual release), this decade-anniversary compilation gives a quick run
(by omitting most of the remixes)
through those recordings and the way they defined Warp’s foundational style. In keeping with the label’s need to clearly demonstrate their approach, the bulk of the songs feature very clean production on their beats and synth-tones, along with fairly simple structuring of their house/techno patterns, with the most ‘cluttered’-sounding likely being the hip-hop-glazed “Hey! Hey! Can U Relate?” by DJ Mink.
Most of the other songs omit vocals entirely, which ends up being one of the main strains linking artists which stuck with the label as long-term attachments (e.g., Nightmares On Wax and LFO), those which had faded away or disbanded even before this compilation’s release (Sweet Exorcist), ones which eventually bounced to other labels (Forgemasters, Coco Steel & Lovebomb), and the groups which put just one or two singles to their name before disappearing (The Step, Tuff Little Unit).
The electronic nature of the music is another big link, of course, as are the extensive use of loops, the very nature of the hardware used at the time, and an undercurrent of funk, but picking out the particulars of style which separate the songs’ similarities is one of the collection’s more entertaining points of usage. Primarily a historical document, it also shows that the singles used to build Warp’s reputation had better-than-decent technique backing them up, even if the same can’t be said of the B-sides.
Downtempo dub with a light chiptune dusting opens this EP in its title track, firm but mellow percussion jiving with light-touch keyboard echoes and sinuous tone-holds. After a hard break, it carries on the chill atmosphere, but puts phasing to play in a prominent way, while a bass loop rolls about and things come undone in an organized fashion.
“Slab” speeds things up by way of hi-hat shakes, drilled drum samples, and more, while dropping in vocal samples about coming to terms with being dead, and “Pomponio” keeps the acceleration moving while lacing in jittered speech and ethereal string. Quick but very solid, and one of the higher-consistency entries in the duo’s too-short catalog; also notable for being (apparently) the only release on the Xiphoid Process Records label.
For the last installment in the 20′ to 2000 series, ELpH (a side-project of the group Coil, focused on self-generative sounds from their musical equipment) provide a single twenty-minute track of nebulous drones, glitchy clippings, and synthetic voices, with their name and title squelching out of the programmed phonemes. The bassy presence of the strongest tone-drift lends things a sinister air, defused somewhat by a shift into acid-housy beats towards the end of the piece. More than a little difficult to hook into, but there’s quite a bit more life to it than the mass of other entries in the series.
Scrambled Brains 