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The prolific Richard H. Kirk has come full circle. Having spent a good part of the '90s focusing on a psychedelic yet subversive brand of techno, Kirk's first music of 2000 harks back to the glory days of Cabaret Voltaire. LOOPSTATIC is at times dark, sinister, and gritty, a slab of dance music working its energy on rust-encrusted metal floors. Kirk's sound palette revisits the distorted, cosmic fuzz beats of CabVolt classics such as "Yashar," but he coats old analog processors in thick layers of aural digitalis.
"Devil in Your Name" is rugged techno made up of coarse bass sequences, sonic dust, and popping Kraftwerkian pulses. "With False Identity" sees Kirk bringing back his trusty radio receivers of old, conducting musique concrFte from arcane transmissions that morph into ambulance-siren dancehall music. The textures of "One Zero" seem to have arisen from a corrupted hard drive ready to obliterate the world. These are the beats to which Prozac-crazed cyberzombies dance. Kirk's tones resemble the take-off bursts of UFOs, and his rhythms stalk hungrily through the stereo field. Your very system hovers on the brink, rescued only as the incredibly hypnotic grooves gradually emerge.
Perhaps the most original debut album to come out of the first wave of British punk, Wire's Pink Flag plays like The Ramones Go to Art School -- song after song careens past in a glorious, stripped-down rush. However, unlike the Ramones, Wire ultimately made their mark through unpredictability. Very few of the songs followed traditional verse/chorus structures -- if one or two riffs sufficed, no more were added; if a musical hook or lyric didn't need to be repeated, Wire immediately stopped playing, accounting for the album's brevity (21 songs in under 36 minutes on the original version). The sometimes dissonant, minimalist arrangements allow for space and interplay between the instruments; Colin Newman isn't always the most comprehensible singer, but he displays an acerbic wit and balances the occasional lyrical abstraction with plenty of bile in his delivery. Many punk bands aimed to strip rock & roll of its excess, but Wire took the concept a step further, cutting punk itself down to its essence and achieving an even more concentrated impact. Some of the tracks may seem at first like underdeveloped sketches or fragments, but further listening demonstrates that in most cases, the music is memorable even without the repetition and structure most ears have come to expect -- it simply requires a bit more concentration. And Wire are full of ideas; for such a fiercely minimalist band, they display quite a musical range, spanning slow, haunting texture exercises, warped power pop, punk anthems, and proto-hardcore rants -- it's recognizable, yet simultaneously quite unlike anything that preceded it. Pink Flag's enduring influence pops up in hardcore, post-punk, alternative rock, and even Britpop, and it still remains a fresh, invigorating listen today: a fascinating, highly inventive rethinking of punk rock and its freedom to make up your own rules.
The alternative boom of the early '90s truly reached a point of no return when someone, somewhere, thought J.G. Thirlwell would fit at home on a major label and maybe become as big a star as, say, Trent Reznor. Certainly Thirlwell did make a compromise for Gash, his debut on Sony Records: He dropped the endless pseudonyms (You've Got Foetus on Your Breath, Phillip & His Foetus Vibrations) he used to hide behind and allowed himself to be billed simply as Foetus. Otherwise, Gash follows the pattern set by every other Foetus album -- which is to say that it's about as far as one can get from the mainstream and still be considered "rock." Forget about catchy, four-minute pop songs -- some of these songs don't even use any rock instruments. "Hammer Falls" is a mixture of Arabic wailing and sitars, and "Mutapump" incorporates what sounds like the opening fanfare of a '50s gladiator movie. And what exactly would newcomers make of "Slung," an 11-minute swing track? Only Thirlwell's feral howl, along with a handful of more industrial-sounding tracks, keeps this in the realm of rock. The already committed (in more ways than one) would agree that this is the cleanest sounding, best-written album Thirlwell has ever done, but industrial fans merely expecting synthesized angst might be utterly bewildered. Ultimately, though, Gash serves as probably the best introduction for those who have never been exposed to Thirlwell's brand of aural brutality, and longtime fans will probably see this as the peak of Thirlwell's creativity.
Jon Anderson and Vangelis released several albums over the years. Their merging of musical styles and ideas has always worked quite well from my point of view. While there was one disc before this, Short Stories, this was the one that really got them attention. It was also the first one that came up on my radar. Vangelis is probably best known for movie soundtrack music and “new age” sounds, but if you really look into his past he was also a progressive rock musician in the band Aphrodite’s Child. In fact, at one point he nearly joined Yes. So, it seems like it must have been destiny for these two men to work together. This album is a great one, with only one song that I am not totally hooked on. I’m not sure that I’d say this is my favorite Jon and Vangelis disc (Private Collection is near and dear to my heart, too) but this one will always be right up there. The blending of new age sounds with progressive rock ones is a great marriage. This still holds up remarkably well, even in a totally different millennium. If you haven’t checked out Jon and Vangelis I can think of no better starting point.
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