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reviews march 2001Silo, Alloy (Swim) CDLava. Hot, molten rock, it flows in slow, intense pulses from a rupture in the Earth's crust, a rupture rent open by vast, unimaginable pressures and tensions. Alloy. Hot, molten rock, it flows in slow, intense pulses from a rupture in Silo's heads, a rupture rent open by vast, unimaginable pressures and tensions. Like Loop, this Danish 3-piece dig deep for troglodyte riffs, three-note boulders of immense weight and power, which they then cram into a computer and smother in neolithic fuzz. Like Flying Saucer Attack they then whack a suitably monolithic and tricky beat underneath and leave the likes of you and I wondering when to nod and when to stand back up. Need New Body, Need New Body (Pickled Egg) CDYou can forgive Need New Body the odd excursion into post-modernism (making a record out of recordings of them making a record) and vacuous plonking tomfoolery (clanking milk bottles and transformer hum) because, for the most part, their hour-long debut is sublime tumbledown glitch jazz. Need New Body fronts like Tom Waits spoiling for a scrap and lurches like Captain Beefheart off his head but, unlike labelmates Bablicon, never lets the plot get too far out of sight. Sure, there's free jazz pomp and parps sellotaped to clumsy electronic noise and abstract flashes of fuck-knows-what, but at the heart is the belief that you can dance to this music. And you can dance to it, especially when the angles are less obtuse and a groove grows from the flowing experimentalism. [This review originally appeared in Sleazenation] Boca 45, Gather Round (Hombre) 12"They'll tell you Big Beat isnt over until the Fat Boy sings but in reality it was haemorrhaging badly even as its chart life began. Stylistically a dead end, it stuck a 60s Beat beat into a sequencer with a limited repertoire and got off on its own sheer audacity. So let's spare ourselves the ordeal of Norman Cook's crooning and celebrate its timely demise with a breakbeat knees-up that neatly side-steps the Big in favour of Large. Gather Round, the sun's out, we've got all day, we love The Show by Doug E Fresh and we're not ashamed to have fun. [This review originally appeared in Sleazenation] Run DMC, Rock Show (Arista) CDSIt's enough to make a King of Rock weep. There Run DMC were, trampling all over MTV's rap policy, resurrecting the career of dinosaur rockers Aerosmith, cementing hip hop's foundations as a world-wide phenomenon and getting handsomely paid. Then things went wrong: a piss-poor film, a cheesy Ghostbuster's tie-in, a monumentally naïve sampling of The Stone Roses and a career resurrection of their own at the hands of Jason Nevins, who they then fucked royally off. Now, with Rock Show, they're trying to show the nu-metal crowd who the originators were. And they're carrying it off with all the skill, poise and aplomb of a drunk uncle at a wedding reception. It wouldn't be quite so bad if they were only ripping off old rhymes (theirs and others) over the average thrash'n'scratch. But getting the singer from Third Eye Blind to deliver the torpid rock chorus Run DMC are past it. Sad news but that's the way it is. [This review originally appeared in Sleazenation] |
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