Review:

on 2011-03-09 CharlesMartel Said:

Damn! I swore I wasn't going to do this again, and I did. There are times when I am such an idiot it defies belief. To avoid saddling myself with albums I don't like (and thereby not wasting my hard-earned cash) I have got into the habit of checking out albums before I buy them. Some time ago, I had downloaded a few tracks of this, listened to them, decided I didn't like them, deleted the tracks and then listened to something else. Then, a few weeks back, I was flicking through CD's in that little indie record shop on Greenwich Church Street and saw this for four quid. So I bought it! What an idiot! I must have known I didn't like it so what the hell was I thinking of.

I hate it. I hated it when I first heard it (I didn't have to listen to it more than once to realise that) and yet I still went out and bought it. OK, four quid isn't the end of the world, but I could have bought half of that deleted Guided by Voices album I saw on eBay yesterday for the same money. Instead, I went and wasted it on this crap. More soporific, boring and extremely tedious music made by and for drugged out hippies.

Not wishing to pull a punch, I have serious issues with music like this. Simply saying I cannot stand it may not be enough to explain it, so it looks like I am going to have to go to some lengths to explain myself. I do not like writing reviews for albums I don't like. While I can have some fun being abusive with some obvious pieces of crap, this is not crap in the sense Britney Spears is crap. This is just something which is the very antithesis of what I want when I listen to music.

It might improve if the band made a serious effort, once they had discovered a chord sequence or an identifiable rhythm, to stick to it. Yet all too often a track starts off as a sound, or jumble of sounds which slowly and, apparently accidentally, move closer into something recognisable as a coherent musical structure before falling apart in an inchoate jumble of sound and noise. It may come across as innovative once, but after a while it just becomes supremely tedious. "Cop Shoot Cop" - all seventeen minutes of it - typifies this. Worse, on "The Individual", it never comes together at all. That's the problem with drugs - they create an alternate reality in which the doped-out individual can relate to the things within that false reality. But everyone outside either sees nothing coherent or nothing of any merit or interest. Tripping out is like an in-joke - only you know the significance of the punch line. And frankly I don't feel like indulging in chemical experiences to try if I can see this in a better light.

Credit where credit is due, the album makes extensive use of a variety of instruments and arrangements, such as the frequent combination of a brass section and synthesisers. The vocals are competent and the band clearly know their way around their instruments. But in all honesty, if this was 1972 instead of 1997, this band would have been Hawkwind. But this isn't and this album can therefore proudly take its place alongside "OK Computer" and "F#A#" as overrated albums from a year when music seemed to have checked its brains in at the hat desk.
Rating: 3/10