From: Winnigan's Fake Date: Tue, 3 Jan 1995 05:34:42 GMT LOVE AND ROCKETS--Hot Trip to Heaven (Beggar's Banquet) It's been 5 years now since Love and Rockets stormed the pop charts with "So Alive", taking it to #1 despite the bafflement of longtime fans. Love and Rockets have always been about moody and dark pop, having graduated from the Batcave scene (all are ex-Bauhaus), so their shoot to fame was puzzling. Most bands would have instantly capitalized on that success and plugged out another album to ride the wave. Instead, Love and Rockets took some time off to regroup, with the two major songwriters, Daniel Ash and David J, releasing wonderfully moody solo albums. Two years later, after finally getting the new album completed, problems with their American record company derailed the album's release. For three years. Now, with record label turmoil behind them, they're delivering the same album they had in the can in 1991 to a public that can barely remember them. Which is probably good. Someone remarked that if this album had been released when it was finished, it would have 'scared the shit out of everyone'. There's maybe some partial truth to that: much of the album has dance-beats layered under Ash's guitar shards, with echoey vocal parts drifting in and out of the mix, and found sound coming in, flitting around a bit, then mutating. It's hard to point to the album and say what it is, precisely: although it's handy to say things like 'it's like Enigma done by ghosts instead of monks', of 'Charlatans meets Cabaret Voltaire', comparisons don't really do it justice. It is what it is. Parts of the album seem a tiny bit dated. The keyboards could probably stand a bit of an update, and the dancy beats and eastern- sounding vocals have come to be a bit cliched by the popularization of same in the interim. But, if you think of this album as an album from 1991 that was previously only available as an import, it starts to make a lot more sense. Enigma and Soup Dragons had nothing on this. The album starts fairly slowly, with a droning keyboard and Ash's guitar noise echoing around until about 7 minutes into the song...and vocals don't come in until a minute after THAT. In all, track one is over fourteen minutes long, and it's not really wasteful. Seven of the album's 10 tracks clock in at over 5 minutes, with seven seeming to be the standard. Granted, most of the album is glorious soundscape, but there are some standout songs, too, like Ash's creepy "Trip and Glide" ('...just trip/and glide with the angels...'), or J's oddly anthemic "Be the Revolution". But, bouncing between electronic dub, echoey eastern instrumentation and clanky and jarring beats, this doesn't sound like a group gunning for another #1 single. In fact, in places it sounds like they were trying to erase their whole career and plop David J into the middle of Tones on Tail. Do you hear me complaining? -- Sean Carruthers, TKM Expatriate | "The human brain is like an enormous fish; Brandon, Manitoba, Canada | it's flat and slimy and has gills through oneiros@access.mbnet.mb.ca | which it can see." --Dr. Graham Chapman