Razed High – Invisible [2001; Insidious Urban Records]

On their only album, the duo of Razed High mesh downtempo beats with swirling sample loops, making chill and jazzy arrangements that float along until fading out to a finish. The A-side takes its time with five tracks, while sixteen are crammed into the second half (turning more into sound assemblages than traditional songs), as track titles such as “Indigenous Invisibility”, “Corporate Blindness”, and “Forest Lost” provide an inflection of societal commentary to the almost entirely instrumental cuts. Squirts of turntablism and bolts of drum-pad embellishment tend to be the most active parts of the songs, but the easy-going rhythmic rides use quiet background texturing to generate levels of depth that can easily slip by the ear. A cool and confident batch of tracks, making it quite a shame that apart from a two-track 7″, this was the group’s only release.

Lords of Acid – Farstucker [2001; Antler-Subway, Fingerlicking Good Records, Max Music Mexico S.A. De C.V., Never Records]

With their fourth album (which would be the band’s last until Deep Chills in 2012), Lords of Acid dive further into their high-energy and highly sexual house/techno/breakbeat blend, with Deborah Ostrega doing a fine job in her replacement of founding member Jade 4 U on vocals. “Scrood Bi U”, a take on “I Wanna Be Loved By You”, a song made famous (again) by Marilyn Monroe, opens the album with a clear demonstration of the group’s humor still being intact, with follow-ups like “Rover Take Over” (an ode to doggy-style sex), “Sex Bomb”, “A Ride with Satan’s Little Helpers”, and “Surfin’ Muncheez” keeping it in the forefront.

The album features more of an industrial rock influence than the band’s previous releases, but the synths and other electronics are still the core of the material, with warping melody lines and keyboard jabs carving up the most guitar-driven tracks, while “Lucy’s F*ck*ng Sky” takes right off on a loop-mad techno soundscape and “(A Treatise On The Practical Methods Whereby One Can) Worship The Lords” launches into near-gabber acid blurting. Though lacking in the earworm choruses and clear hooks of earlier albums, Farstucker shows the group still operating at high intensity, and while it may be something of an abrupt drop into their decade of hiatus, the sense that they had no intentions of going missing for that long is both a relief and an explanation for why so much get thrown at the wall on this release.

Here’s the original cover art.

Eels – Souljacker [2001; DreamWorks Records, Universal]

With their fourth studio album, Eels continue polishing their crusty strain of alternative rock and off-putting pop, with quick and usually open-ended stories of unsatisfied desires. Pitting catchy choruses and hooky melodies against themes of death, depression, and an antagonistic world, the band busies up the base arrangements with a potpourri of background sounds, fragmentary samples, keyboard inflections, and murky filters on the vocals. Touches like parade-style horns dove-tailing into raspy electric guitar, music-box piano against reversed synths, and the persistent lo-fi pressure in the clearly high-budget production help maintain an atmosphere of unpredictable oddities, and while the drowning of the vocals in studio effects keeps it from being as memorable as preceding albums in the group’s catalog, it still has some interesting expressions and experiments of its off-beat style.

The Crystal Method – Tweekend [2001; Geffen Records, Outpost Recordings, Universal International, Universal Music]

On their second album, the duo of The Crystal Method polish up their big beat formulae from the first LP while downplaying the slower, more texture-focused aspects in favor of heavier vocal sample usage (as shown in “Wild, Sweet & Cool” and “Name of the Game”) and clear beat patterns with sub-layers that become deceptively dense when they really get going. In addition to
occasional turntable scratching, the album also finds the group incorporating more near-rapping delivery for the lyrics. From the switching between lilt and Linkin Park-ish yowl from
Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland

for “Murder”, to the go-for-it commercial bravado of “Name of the Game”, this is likely the most telling sign of the time from which it came.

While the rap efforts are underwhelming, they don’t veer into outright cringeworthiness too often, and the instrumental side provides laudable efforts to support their weakness. But the fully-instrumental tracks show the group at their best, following and escalating beats and brazen keyboards into deep, heady grooves. The overall shift towards faster material does have a few bumps to it, but unfortunate as it is to lose the more atmospheric studies the band’s first album pulled off so well, it clarifies the suggestion that their capabilities were being pushed into fresh territories. It may not be an even trade, but the confidence practically oozes from Tweekend’s most active songs, and the one-two finish of “Blowout”‘s towering loop-stacks and “Tough Guy”‘s octane cool-down is

just about enough to earn full forgiveness of the album’s faults.

Here’s the cover art version with title included.

Crunch – 1 [2001; Musik Aus Strom]

The first album from the duo of Mike Wallis and Dave Tipper under the name Crunch offers up fifteen tracks of clippy, buzzy electronic experimentation, applying IDM techniques to more sedate soundscapes. Chopped and drilled percussion, sharp pitch changes, squished breakbeats, and a host of audio filters are applied and combined over the course of the album, with the infrequent bursts of higher energy sliding right into place next to the more chill regularity.

Despite the often fragmentary style of the songs, the grab-bag of effects, and the absence of vocals, the album keeps its flow going without much stumbling, and the processed nature of the music combines well with the sly humor that flavors most of the pieces. It does end up drifting into redundancy a few times, but the reconfigured tweaks help brush that off as a minor flaw. All together, some nicely creative works built on strong technical knowledge.

Jetone – Ultramarin [2001; Force Inc. Music Works]

Working with sculpted synth tones, hollow-bodied percussion samples, and stretched bursts of static, Jetone (a side-project of Tim Hecker) focuses on the rhythmic build-ups and interactions of the songs in Ultramarin, his second (and, to date, last) album under the Jetone name. Housy 4/4 bumps collide with fractured sound injections, with the layers slowly cycling against each other to produce the majority of the album’s activity. Though the sonics are undeniably produced with great polish and attentiveness to their shaping, the music itself tends to be rather dull, feeling something like auditory wallpaper, or excerpts from program executions.

The main sense of Hecker’s personality in the music is communicated through its restraint and deliberation, and while the album does paint him as pains-taking in that regard, it rarely makes for stimulating listening (”Thousand Oaks” being the prime exception, with its more active bent and quicker fading in and out of loops). Even when there’s clear effort built into shifting the loop qualities over a run (e.g., “Phoedra II”, with its swell and sink of percussion prominence), the songs don’t really go anywhere with it, but instead seem to circle in place for several minutes before simply ending. Decent background noise, with a few moments worth attention, but overall, very low-key with its energy and innovation.

Prince – The Rainbow Children [2001; NPG Records, Redline Entertainment, Shock]

Turning up the jazz ratio in his funk rock, Prince’s first studio album of the 21st century opens with the ~10-minute title track, digging into expanding sax riffs and gospel-like counterpoint chorus, before flowing into mellower instrumental work to set the pace for the rest of the album. Trimming down on electronics aside from vocal modulation, the music is some of Prince’s most spontaneous-sounding material outside of live albums and his Madhouse side-project, with the supporting band getting a rather large amount of focus in comparison to Prince’s usual output.

Horns, electric piano, live drumming, and flute join the staples of electric guitar and lots of bass in the compositions, which ride a fine line between feeling highly rehearsed and allowing for slight improvisation in the recording room. Prince’s vocals, whether tender or didactic, keep a smoky edge that plays interestingly against the crispness of the wind instruments, and the infrequent spotlighting of a single instrument makes for a neat thread through the album. The interspersed narrative of the rainbow children, told by a down-pitched voice, is somewhat less than engaging, but the bridges from that to the full songs are entertaining, and at times amusing. An oddly balanced album, but quite nice when taken in one piece.

Here’s the alternate cover art used in Taiwan.

Peak A Soul+ – ボクと魔王 [2001; Judius]

The score to the PS2 video game
ボクと魔王 (released outside of Japan as Okage: Shadow King) brought together six composers under the umbrella of the ‘Peak A Soul+’ name, to write cues for the game both individually and in various collaborative configurations. The majority of the music takes on an almost carnivalesque mood, with emulated wind instruments and little blats of brass joining programmed percussion and tambourines, with inventive combinations of odd rhythms helping to foster a proggy sense of the musicians’ immersion in their work.

The pieces representing different villages of the game are given little touches of individuation, like the background whir of gears for “Theme of Madril”, and the assorted dungeons and battle themes are given similarly distinct energies to fit with their contexts. For a score with such a large team of composers behind it, the music generally flows together well, with revisited motifs and retained instrumentation helping to make the jumps from one of the song-writers to the next almost indistinguishable.

At two CDs in length, with alternate versions of a number of cues included directly after their original cuts, it does run rather long, but that also offers some insight into the ideas the composers had for how to approach the same material from different angles. While the presentation might have benefited from some ordering adjustments, the actual content is excellent, and much like the game itself, takes some unorthodox approaches to qualities which have become common-place for the genre.

Karera Musication – Koroshiya Ichi [2001; Cinema Monsoon]

The score to Takashi Miike’s film 殺し屋１ (Ichi the Killer)

is essentially a side-project from the Japanese group Boredoms, as all four members of Karera Musication (for whom this was the only release) had put time into that band as well. The score freely plays around with noise and sonic treatments (to the point of including a series of hearing test tones in the opening track, “1″), meshed with post-rock and world music in a blurry flood of riffs and melodic extrapolations. Fine-cut audio splicing comes and goes, weird vocal squeaks push into jazzy horn licks, muddy squelches drift into mad drumming into electric-sizzle guitar, traditional Chinese instrumentation is merged with dub, and so on. As free-roaming as the music is, it somehow ties all together quite well, and the quiet menace that looms up occasionally plays at nice odds with the psychopathy on display in the film.