01 Acrid Avid Jamshred
02 The Waxen Pith
03 Wax The Nip
04 Icct Hedral
05 Ventolin (Video Edit)
06 Come On You Slags
07 Start As You Mean To Go On
08 Wet Tip Hen Ax
09 Mookid
10 Alberto Balsam
11 Cow Cud Is A Twin
12 Next Heap With
Due to my lack of industry connections, my lack of local import outlets, and my chronic lack of motivation, my reviews are usually delayed. This one is no exception. I've been listening to this disc for about a week now, and although I appreciated it instantly, it has continued to grow on me. Although one is free to argue the earnest / cynical intonation of the title (I lean towards the latter), the work as a whole is of a higher quality than some of the more recent works RDJ has been so heavily slagged for. There's more thought and attention to detail and your ears can tell. As mentioned before, production is flawless, and most importantly the heavy use of orchestral structure and elements marks an exciting new direction, (or at least a good head fake.) The percussion and melody are as complex and non-4/4 as ever, and the filler tracks and obviously reworked ideas are relatively few. It would be a major stretch to call the collection instantly accessible, but it is certainly engaging after relatively few listens. The overall emotive tone of the disc, as invoked by several songs is one of an amalgam of beauty and concern, a mood of pristine, crystalline worry. The songs are framed by beautiful noises held together by complex and disturbed structures. It's nice, but in many cases leaves you longing for a silver cloud that doesn't come with a dark, brooding lining. The collection hangs together fairly well around a pretty consistent feel and theme, and this is somewhat refreshing after the jeckyl and hyde sucker punch sequencing of several recent RDJ releases.
For lack of a more creative alternative, I choose track by track rundown as my review strategy:
Acrid Avid Jamshred opens with a kickin', but simple snare and tom line. The funky drummer adds nuance upon layer upon syncopated morph to this line until it becomes the tightly wound upright spine of the song that you soon realize it is. Nice ambient washings, some bleeps, quirts and sweeps round it out, but in the end this song is about drums, funky drums. You can picture Mr. Drummahman in the dimly lit club, eyes closed, just gettin' into it, and the gritty snap of his beats is evidence of the fact that he'd just as soon come over and kick your ass as provide the beats to keep this song nailed down. After some short-wave tuning speaker to speaker whining, all superfluous sound is peeled back to reveal again this rhythmic jewel as you ask yourself " Is there really such a thing as a 1/64th note?" Kickin', and an encouraging opener.
A good example of the intermingling of beauty and nervous tension that permeate many of the tracks on this disk is The Waxen Pith. It opens with some nice drums with an acidic fart beat, but then a surprise element wanders in, catching the seasoned AFX listener totally off guard: Violins!!??!! They're pretty, diligent and I like 'em, but it took me several listens not to double take upon first hearing them. Plenty more orchestral floss from the same quiver abounds on this disc, so get used to it quick. This one for some reason forever reminds me of a spider repairing its web as rapidly as possible before some oncoming disaster ( a tank, perchance?) forever crushes its masterpiece. This oncoming disaster, which started out as an innocuous acid fart, becomes more and more violent throughout the piece until it threatens to throw your sub woofer voice coil right out of the enclosure in the closing moments of the piece.
Wax The Nip could just as easily have been titled Quoth: Bike Pump Meets Calliope. The interesting, multi-foiled beat barrage is as indecipherable and undanceable as ever, but not as full frontally assaulting as Quoth due to the pleasant organ washes which saturate and smooth over the caucus. Nice but not tremendously groundbreaking. I give it an F for filler.
I really don't know and don't care if Phil Glass had a hand in Icct Hedral, but it scares me every time a hear it. Deliberate piano pounding and tortured electronic screams and growls kick this one off. It would make a great Hitchcock or Steven King soundtrack to a scene of a frantic, panic-driven murder cover up. I hear the cops coming up the stairs, where'd I hide the murder weapon? The probing penetrating melody is alternatively shared by strings, synths and screeches. Midway through, an orchestral break builds the climax up even farther through some ascending dynamics and key shifts until the nagging rhythm / melody line takes on an almost "nanny nanny boo boo, they're gonna catch you" bent that would drive even the most coolly calculated killer a little crazy. I giggle every time I picture Conductor James, with black tails and stick in hand, passionately working the orchestra pit up to frenzy in this one.
Enough has been said about Ventolin, so I'll touch upon it only briefly; the video edit appears to be very similar, if not identical, to the Salbutamol mix. I like this tune because it's crunchy, abrasively melodic and funky. This track is about heavy machinery gleefully wrecking havoc on its creators, a steroid driven pipe organ joyfully and purposefully plowing over everything in its path. The 4Khz whine is there and initially annoying, but it's nothing that a good EQ notch filter (or repeated listenings at high volume) won't cure. This whine ploy becomes interesting only when you realize that Richard's dog whistle is used as the white space between the snippets of sound that compose this song. You start to appreciate this more at the end of the track as the squelching slides in and out of the whine become more noticeable between notes. Since 95+% of the folks that will buy this disc already have the Ventolin single and remixes, the addition of this track adds little to the collection, but it is a good track, nonetheless.
Come On You Slags sounds like it was cut in the Tamphex / Xylem era, and it doesn't fit with the rest of this collection, even the harder Ventolin. Repetitive samples of the "fantasy coming out party", dark synth lines, a tom line reminiscent of polygon window, and some hard and crackin' beats compose this relatively uneventful piece. It doesn't do much for me, it doesn't fit, and shouldn't have made its way past the edit deck.
Start As You Mean To Go On does a nice job of tossing elements of several of the On remixes and B-sides into an essentially new piece. The dominant elements are the main On 16 count melody line, softened up, pushed back in the mix and looped endlessly, interspersed with the driving beats and rewind segues of 73 yips. I think I hear elements of the D-Scape mix, but miss the drag-your-thumb-on-the-turntable quirkiness of the u-Ziq mix, which is my favorite. All in all, this recycling works well for me, and the track doesn't come off sounding too "used" It's a neat idea and I'm glad he included it here.
Prodding muffled bass drums and a troubled sounding string loop open up Wet Tip Hen Ax. Sharp bleeping and gradual percussion line development build this one up, as additional layers of strings and an oboe-like whale call loop into the mix. We're searching for something here, in an urgently mournful way. The break is a more upbeat refrain, with a background setting of those shuffley filtered rephlex drums that I've grown to love over the last 12 months. This song is pleasant, there's a lot going on in an understated way, and it develops well without confusing the listener. I'm reminded of an Arctic expedition, pushing forward rapidly through the ice crystals against a background of cloudless, purple skies.
Mookid is a lovely one that I quite liked upon first spin and have grown more fond of with each listen. The beats and handclaps are here throughout, but they're muffled and shuffled as if through sheets of colored tissue paper. You really want to groove to it, but you're inclined to just smile and tap along without calling any attention to yourself, because it's so damn subdued. A nice touch is the use of a soothing steel-drum sounding wave to propel the melody line, which is a simple four measure loop that is repeated with no mutation, save changes in the sustain. Sliding and sweeping meows come in and out to signal the next round under the cover of some very warm ambient washes, until this teaser ends quite abruptly. This track and its tasty successor are the SAWII tracks that you can dance to. I'd kill for 4 or 5 more of these gems.
It seems that everyone's fave (mine included) is the lovely Alberto Balsam. The same warm steel drums from the prior track are used to carry the theme in this one, although James allows them to do a lot more in this one. It's a starkly beautiful riff, cornwall calypso that's elegant in its simplicity and singularity of focus, It loops around the block, repeatedly building up to a nice climax of 8 hits of clanging pans peeled naked of all melody, than Boing, back to square one. For me, this is the first time RDJ has successfully packaged the emotion that was there in droves on SAWII into a beat and melody driven package. This one has the lovely warm organic goo and sparkling buildups that I normally expect from a Middleton / Pritchard track, and for me, this is the track that proves that he DOES care, whether its because we do or not. The scary part about this one is that it could actually get commercial airplay.
Trainspotter points to all those for whom Cow Cud Is A Twin confirmed the suspicion that Mr. AFX is a Mac user. The Speech to Text feature of Sys 7.5 that was first featured in the shout out at the end of the Ventolin single (Whisper voice) is used here as well, with several of the great and funny voices (Bells and Hysterical) put to good use. A nice sampled upright string bass loop and car door slamming poke the plodding, trip-hoppy melody along. It's pretty happy and upbeat, doesn't drive you anywhere too fast, but that's okay. Rather, it chooses to swagger amidst a mosh of church chimes and doodahs to the crisp snap of another riveting snare line.
After a string of rather soothing and pleasant tracks, we end on a suspenseful and sequel-invoking note in Next Heap With. After opening with some eerie haunted house organ chord progressions, the staccato strings which provide the only real beats in this song arrive. A fluegel horn / french horn call reminiscent of a warrior trumpeting on a conch in the midnight fog strikes a tone that is proud in a stark and singular way. We are clearly pushing the iceberg out into uncharted waters, but we go there knowingly and willingly, because we know it's beautiful out there. With renewed faith, I can't wait for the next RDJ release to find out where "there" is.
all rights reserved, all wrongs reversed, 1995.
