Apollo 440 Electro Glide In Blue

Apollo 440 Electro Glide In Blue

Get It At Discogs

Their second album Electro Glide in Blue opens with a sublime short instrumental Stealth Overture, before launching in earnest into the second single Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Dub. Largely built around a Van Halen sample with some lively drum and bass affectations, it’s both iconic and great, although I suspect if you weren’t there in 1997, it would be more than a little difficult to understand why. Altamont Super-Highway Revisited is next, perhaps one of the weaker tracks on here, but it bounces along pleasantly enough until we get to title track Electro Glide in Blue, a dark eight-and-a-half minute odyssey full of self-doubt and angst. From one epic to another, Vanishing Point is next, a gentle drum and bass piece with enormous vocal pads and even bigger bass. While most people were busy hanging around being sultry in soundalike indie bands, Apollo 440 were to be found creating seven or eight minute electronic opuses. That is not to say that guitars don’t have their place here, as Tears of the Gods demonstrates, with a great vocal from Charles Bukowski, but the guitar work here is altogether more soulful than what most people were throwing around in the mid-1990s. Final single Carrera Rapida is next, the theme from a computer game called Rapid Racer, and the single came with a great CD containing all the background music from the game, all built around the theme of this track. By itself, it’s lively, but probably not the best thing on here. Then comes the lead single Krupa, an homage to a drummer called Gene Krupa, and so the focus of the piece is largely the drumming, with a couple of repeated synth lines over the top. It’s entirely unexpected, but very good nonetheless. Following a quieter moment with White Man’s Throat, the finest moment on the album comes with the glorious Pain in Any Language, featuring Billy Mackenzie on vocals. It’s another long one, clocking in at nearly nine minutes in duration, but right from the start the slightly Asian sounding chimes and emotive vocals really make you feel something special. That only leaves us to return to the beginning for an enormous pseudo-classical piece Stealth Mass in F#m, which with its choral vocals seems slightly out of place, unless you’re happy to accept that Apollo 440 were really just doing whatever they wanted here, a fact which is comfortably backed up by the bonus track on the end, the other single Raw Power, a hugely energetic piece that shakes you up rather after the gentler ending which preceded it.