This week in new releases I explore Danish pop music, find a strange little compilation from the 90s that should have been left there, finally finish my Unwoman backcatalogue, and more...
New Releases:
The Asteroids Galaxy Tour - Out Of Frequency
Label: self released (Distributed through BMG Entertainment)
Released: 1/31 2012
Genre: Synthpop, Pop
Remember Rover from The Prisoner TV Series? The bouncing balls that captured runaways and returned them to the Village? Imagine that mutated into a giant Disco Ball, chasing you down, trying to return you to a night club past its Coolness Expiration Date. That touches on the pop-banality that is embodied in this album. A dash of synthpop sensibility saves it from complete annihilation, but in all honesty... the beats are boring. The lead singers voice hovers somewhere between "she's twelve, right?" and a husky R&B smoothness. Two songs stand out as worth pulling onto a nights worth of dance-pop-music fun, Heart Attack and Ghost In My Head, with the first being actually good. Otherwise, the album manages to not sound completely uninteresting. In ten years I'll probably wonder why I bought this in the first place. Final analysis? Some harsh electro would save this, otherwise it sinks under it's own weight of recycled dance rhythms. Despite that I like it a little bit.
Adding To The Collection:
Poe - Hello
Label: Atlantic
Released: 1995
Genre: Trip-Hop, Pop
Speaking of pop... Poe entered in the 1990s, as Trip-Hop started to evolve itself, and it's those trip-hop beats that save Poe from the previously mentioned pop-banality. Her voice is smooth, unmarred with any kind of over reaching desire to actually sound pop-music influenced. The music moves back and forth between soft-rock and trip-hop beats, from one song to the next. The whole thing feels completely radio friendly, but not actually radio-boring. A few tracks did find themselves endlessly repeated on stations in the US just discovering "techno" and female lead vocals that weren't Madonna pop-music clones or Lita Ford wannabe screamers. This album is good, catchy, and ultimately the kind of thing that saved us from an endless wave of complete shit. How this took so long to end up in my collection - who knows, it was always one of those "Hey, I should buy that..." albums that, well, I never got around to. At this point, you should revisit Poe (and the newer stuff is amazing, also on the To Get List...), and purchase this. Give it a listen, it's quiet, loud, amusing, sad, and all together extremely well produced. Hello has aged well as an album, even if it seems a little antiquated, it's not an ageless album, but you can still pull it out and genuinely enjoy it, with or without nostalgia.
Unwoman - Trouble EP
Label: none (available on Bandcamp)
Released: 2008
Genre: Pop, Synthpop, Modern Classical
This 6 song EP starts out with a kind of light neo-classical kind of sound, like most of her work. After that, it gets more electronic production than modern classical. The cello is still there, but the synth-pop kind of beats tend to take a more center stage appearance in some of the music. This isn't a bad colllection, but it doesn't really leave an impression either. It's just there, good music but it feels like there's nothing there making me want to pause and Listen. Throw it on in the background and let it fill the room, like chamber music, you welcome its presence, but mostly because you'd rather not have silence. Not to disparage ovbviously good music, but this is a lot like a watered down Danielle Dax.
Unwoman - Unremembered
Label: none (available on Bandcamp)
Released: 2010
Genre: Modern Classical
There's something in here I really like, it reminds me a lot of the synth-driven darkwave and ambience from bands like Daughter Darling, Bed Of Roses, or even Switchblade Sumphony. Coupled with a kind of smart pop-sensibility that gives you the catchy grooves and hooks without numbing the mind. I put this one on and kind of absentmindedly nod my ahead along to it, half listening and half simply absorbing it. Gone are a lot of the staggered rhythms or interrupted beats from earlier albums. The whole thing flows and works together quite nicely. Layer on more percussion and these songs could easily slip into a club-scene danse set, as they sit it's a quieter space that actually does fill the room with a lively sound that every once in a while you stop and listen for a moment, before continuing on. It's the kind of album I'd put on if I needed something upbeat to get some work done to, without it being so intrusive it interferes with the work. Definitely an album to go pick up.
Baz Luhrmann Presents: Something For Everybody
Label: Capital Records
Released: 1999
Genre: House, Pop, etc
Moving right back into - WTF?! there's this. Absolutely proof that not just any asshole with a sequencer who can cleverly put together a single hit should actually be given a full record to work on. Remember that song "Wear sunscreen..." and this older sounding guy going on about a bunch of advice like "Live in New York once, but leave before it makes you hard..." and so on? Yeah, someone told Baz he could make a whole album. And it's a bunch of remixes and covers, only a moderately decent cover of When Doves Cry even comes close to not being total crap. This is pretty much everything wrong with 1990s style House/Electronica. It's just a horrible compilation. I literally ran across the CD by accident, I don't even have the full case and liner notes (Discogs helped with all of that), obviously the previous owner felt the same way I do now. This is pretty much what happens when the 'music industry' thinks it knows what's going on, this came out of the US about the same time the UK was developing what would be come dubstep, France was starting to experiment with electro-swing, and the rest of the House Music world was diversifying, this takes all the music DJs and Producers made and distills down into a pop-music death spiral. The song was right, Wear Sunscreen, the rest, leave behind. This should have been titled "Nothing For Anybody."
Next Week:
I explore South African hip-hop, find some modern Hard Rock that doesn't suck, a little Soft Rock to balance it out, check out Zimbabwe, and drag myself through yet another Industrial/EBM compilation. . .
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