Collecting nine songs from Elmore James’ catalog, including one from his very first single (B-side “Dust My Broom”), this compilation show-cases his Chicago-style blues, with amped guitar and sizable backing bands. Horns, piano, dobro guitar, bass, drums, and more join in on the slow-cruising tunes, with the pulse of the lead guitar and sly soulfulness of James’ vocals providing the main driving energy. The songs are kept brief, with just a third running over three minutes, but the moody character packed into each song helps them feel larger, and despite the collection as a whole just barely scraping past 25 minutes, it makes for a decent introduction to and overview of James’ music.
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.
Presenting three CDs worth of label holdings, this compilation largely restricts itself to material issued by Ninja Tune in the five years leading up to its release (the earliest inclusion comes from 1998, with nothing from the eight years of the label’s existence before that making an appearance). The set serves up pieces of alternative pop, conscious hip-hop, amped-up breakbeat, jazzy leftfield, pop rap, electrofunk, and a bevy of other niche and cross-pollinated styles, with over forty artists, plus dozens of guests and remixers, shown off over the three hours and change of its run-time.
Unsurprisingly, most of the picks are tunes which had been deemed worthy of being put out as a single, due to catchiness, especially strong beats, or whatever other factors, so there’s a fairly strong base-line to the quality of the music. Production values are high, with a warehouse’s worth of synths, drum machines, and samples put to work, while the turntable antics associated with the label’s founders, Coldcut (who get in a few tracks of their own), get much less exposure than might be expected.
There’s no apparent division or theming between the three discs (titled, respectively, “You”, “Don’t”, and “Know”), aside from the second having a lot of heavy lyrical repetition, which seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity for running the tracks in chronological (or even alphabetical) order, or breaking it into groups of the most similarly-styled tracks. Despite that, there’s a good flow to each, and to the compilation as a whole, so it’s not much of a fault, just weirdly directionless for such a large collection. And though that bulkiness does make diving into the fifty songs a little off-putting, it also gives a nice cross-section of Ninja Tunes’ styles at the time, so in the end, it does all that it was meant to do.
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.
Jungle, trip-hop, and psyhouse are the main styles of this compilation,
with the biggest names appearing on it being those of Cujo (Amon
Tobin’s first project), Tosca, and Francis Bebey.
An atmosphere of chill grooves with some clever sample play and an expansive percussive range pervades the collection, with drum’n’bass flavors evident but rarely taking control for more than a few measures.
Well-handled momentum and track positioning keeps the flow moving smoothly through the hour or so of the eleven tracks, sliding into and out of the higher energy portions without a stumble. There are a few ear-worms (with Trankilou’s “Chicago Babe” probably taking top honors in that regard), and while most of the artists included have few releases to their name, all of the picks that made it are high-quality.
Eighteen tracks of steady-beat techno, leaning into downtempo pacing while layering touches in all over the place. Bass commands most of the songs, while the higher-pitched inclusions tend to be dragged over the top in fragile-sounding ways. The points of acceleration that do crop up feel, for the most part, like they’re just dressing on the slow-moving bass bump loops, which lends a sense of hard separation between the two ends. There’s plenty of technical skill and careful programming on display, but very few of the songs feel like they actually do much of anything beyond following the loops through some light ramping. A nice snapshot of electronic groups just under the mainstream radar at the time of its release, and some generally chill beat atmospheres, but not much more than that.
In this third installment collecting spare works by Chris
Hülsbeck (preceded by 1991′s Shades and 1992′s To Be on Top), pieces composed during his time with the German video game development studio of Rainbow Arts are the focus, including cuts from Z-Out, Jinks, and The Great Giana Sisters. Despite being rerecorded for the CD’s release, hardware from the Atari and Commodore computers for which the games were released is still used, with Hülsbeck drawing some impressively lithe performances out of the machines, and vocals appearing on four of the nineteen songs.
A broad spectrum of moods and song-writing approaches keep things moving and varied, with the expected early techno joined by more freeform and laidback compositions. On the downside, most of the tracks are main themes and medleys, which prevents much momentum or continuity from developing beyond the repetition of beat-patterns and certain synth voices. It’s a nice tour, with plenty of well-made moments (sometimes to a startling degree, considering the limited instrumentation), but it works much better in separate servings (particularly with the sound packs of the last four tracks, “Samplemania” I through IV) than taken in one go.
Released the same year as Justice’s debut album, this compilation features tracks from them and their label-mates on the French label of Ed Banger Records, with French house
being the primary flavor,
while hip-hop, electro, hard techno, and turntablism influences float about freely. Stiff buzzes, glossy touch-ups, manic percussion, and odd-beat but funky rhythms fill the music, most of it eschewing vocals.
Tone slides, lo-fi samples, and over-amping lend things a generally buzzy feel, which helps mask the heavy amounts of production that went into the electronic pieces with gritty patinas and forceful kicks. A good tour through the electronic stage of the era, with most of the tracks still sounding ahead of their time, and an enjoyable batch of lively electronica even without that context.
This compilation spotlights over a dozen underknown garage rock groups, several of them with just one or two singles to their name, but highly cool across the board. Blendings of surf, funk, pop, traditional rock & roll, and psychedelic are on display, with high enthusiasm helping sand over the general roughness of the production. The songs go by quickly enough that their similarities blend together a bit, but the sharpness of the riffs and choruses, along with the good humor, pop up some distinction to balance out the bleed-over of the electric guitar tones. Some Beatles-like experimentation with Eastern flavors crops up occasionally, but rarely as more than just a glazing over the regular rock foundations. All in all, a nice tour through some obscure tunes, and a neat touchstone for historical context.
Pulling together just over a dozen solo and group acts signed to various record labels (plus a couple of bands which appeared only on releases in this compilation series), this album seems to have been put together without much shaping of its intent beyond offering up some edge-of-counter-culture music of its time. Touching on early-’90s alt rock, rockabilly, conscious rap, heavy electro, spoken word, industrial, and more, the collection drifts through assorted moods of anxiety and detachment, strident and calm presentations, political and personal perspectives, and so on. Aside from the flavoring of its point in time and the general alternative shading, the main thing linking the songs is that they’re all performed with quite a bit of style and a strong sense of character. Outside of that, it’s an unpredictable grab-bag, but there’s still fun to be had with it.
Scrambled Brains 