The Batlord

Trollheart would knock that **** out while taking a crap.

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Frownland

“A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart ”

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Black Francis

Yea but TH is a freak of nature. Him and innerspaceboy.

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"Hey Kids you got to meet the MIGHTY PIXIES!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbRbCtIgW3A

YorkeDaddy

I love it when you’re thirsty for my posts

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9-Time Winner of MusicBanter's "Most Qualified to be a Moderator" Award

YorkeDaddy

Iggy Pop - The Idiot

I've been a huge fan of this album for a long time, in fact I made it the profile picture for my now-dead last.fm account: https://www.last.fm/user/thebryanmullins

A big reason behind my love of this album is definitely Bowie's contribution. My favorite album of all-time is "Low" by Bowie, and this is one of the few albums that has some strong similarities to that masterpiece. I find it fascinating how Bowie kind of used this album as a playground for him to start developing that kind of electronic style, and while this album is definitely not as great as "Low" to me it is still quite excellent.

We open with "Sister Midnight" which is a truly superb opener and one of my favorite tracks on the album. You could slap this song on "Low" and it would not sound out of place at all. I just love the groovy vibe and melody that accompanies the hoppy instrumentation. This song is basically perfect to me and I could listen to it on repeat.

"Nightclubbing" follows and it takes its time getting started, which is a common complaint I have with a couple of the tracks on the album as we'll see later. The song kind of meanders at a slower tempo, which definitely evokes the feeling and sights of nightclubbing quite well so it definitely succeeds in conveying the tone that it's going for. I just wouldn't call this my favorite on the album by any stretch.

"Funtime" is exactly that, a fun, shorter track that feels a bit more like The Stooges than most of this album. It's a nice rock song that doesn't do anything spectacular but is certainly enjoyable. I'm a big fan of Iggy's vocal performance on "Baby," which is a great track despite its relatively simple structure. "China Girl" is an awesome, dynamic rock track that never gets old to me. It pumps along with great melodies and instrumentation throughout, though it has kind of a limp-dick ending using an unnecessary fade out.

"Dum Dum Boys" oozes cool with its confident rocking tempo and some cool lyrics, though I'd say it overstays its welcome a bit and once again has a very weak ending. Feels like they ran out of ideas for the song and faded it out because they weren't sure what else to do, which is definitely disappointing. "Tiny Girls" is another favorite with some nice horns to open it up, giving the album some more instrumental variety that I always appreciate.

"Mass Production" needed its opening minute cut off completely, it just kind of sits there doing nothing with some quiet synths for way too long. Once it gets going though, this track is a masterpiece. I love everything about it from minute 1 onward. The wobbly, trippy synth work is incredible, providing some of my favorite moments in all of music, period. This track is dynamic, groovy, infectious, and all-around spectacular even despite the unnecessarily long opening.

Overall this is an album with a handful of noticeable flaws but overall it is a fantastic collection of tracks that I come back to quite frequently. It's so enjoyable for me to see the collaboration between two artists that I respect so much, and to hear the beginnings of Bowie's utilization of these kinds of electronic songwriting methods that spawned my all-time favorite album. "The Idiot" is definitely a wonderful album that I would recommend to nearly anyone, and from me it gets a clean 9/10.

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9-Time Winner of MusicBanter's "Most Qualified to be a Moderator" Award

Tristan_Geoff

The opening synth of Mass Production is essential to building the industrial atmosphere that leads the rest of the song. I can see it bein kinda a drag tho.

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YW Fam: All MB Music Projects Under One Roof

Emo/Pop Punk Journal

Techno Journal

The Batlord

And now for the main event.

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YorkeDaddy

How would you react if I were to love it and give it a 10

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9-Time Winner of MusicBanter's "Most Qualified to be a Moderator" Award

YorkeDaddy

Insane Clown Posse - Riddle Box

To start off, I just wanted to say **** you Batlord, just to get that out of the way. I had to listen to this at home instead of work because I was afraid to put whatever this album is on the speakers in the office lol

And...I am both disgusted and confused to admit that I enjoyed this album quite a bit.

Like any self-respecting consumer of music, I did some research into ICP and this album before and during my time listening to it. My prior knowledge was basically nothing outside of the Juggalo fanbase and culture, in fact I've seen a documentary on a big summer party that is held by the Juggalos somewhere, but I don't remember many details outside of the fact that the fanbase was weird as **** but overall I respected the fact that they were all there simply out of a love of the culture and each other. Everyone seemed chill and incredibly open to anyone else that was interested in being a part of it. I look like a generic middle class white dude and I feel like I would be embraced if I ever showed up at that kind of an event and displayed an interest in being involved.

Despite seeing that documentary, I knew basically nothing about the actual music. For the longest time I assumed they would be some kind of wacky metal, and only kind of recently was informed that they're actual a hip hop act. So yeah, I was completely ignorant and had some dramatically incorrect assumptions about these guys for most of my life.

During my research I was pretty fascinated to read that their music was actually part of a massive conceptual universe where people go to a "Dark Carnival" when they die and are judged on their life by one of six "Joker cards," one being the Riddle Box the album is named after. To be completely honest, that's a sweet concept and one that I respect a lot. The music is very "horror" inspired with its sampling and general vibe which wraps the whole package together pretty nicely.

The problem is that the Dark Carnival concept itself seems to be hardly explored in the music except for the first couple tracks. The rest of the album beyond that is pretty much a sequence of songs about people dying interspersed with some decent enough skits. I think this is just way too many songs for this style of album, I really don't understand why they felt the need to extend this for so long. It's not like there are deep new conceptual lyrics on the latter half that they really needed to fit in there, or any truly interesting variations in tone or instrumentation.

There are a couple exceptions. "Lil' Somthin' Somthin'" is a nice slowdown track that has a decent groove and some funny lyrics. It's the best "melodic" attempt on the album. Other highlights are "Cemetery Girl" and definitely "Headless Boogie". I appreciate the cool synths on "Ol' Evil Eye". There's a great, dark, deep bass that makes "12" nice and spooky and the best atmospheric track on here.

I think there are some redundant offenders here though that really drag the album down some points. "Toy Box" is pretty weak on all fronts and has some mediocre rapping of the same angry note over and over. It's got a couple goofy fun samples here and there but also some annoying gun shots and glass breaking that's just whatever. "The Killing Fields" started to get me a little bored. "I'm Coming Home" is pretty boring and has no real variation throughout its obnoxious 6 minute runtime, and the ending fade out is weak as **** for a group that plays it so hard otherwise throughout. . By the end I had definitely started to grow a bit tired of it...70 minutes just feels grossly unnecessary here.

Not much else to say. This is one of the biggest gaps between expectations and how I actually ended up feeling about an album. We might have a pretty impressive score here if they cut 20 minutes off the thing and tightened up the track listing a bit, but even despite that glaring flaw I would still give it a decent 6/10.

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The Batlord

"Toy Box" is one of my fav ICP tracks. I love how it has that sing song flow that makes it feel like a ratchet nursery rhyme. And "Chicken Huntin'" is a world class banger.

Too bad you didn't play this at work.

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