Mojo

Were your Pig Destroyer recommendations in order? Because i only have Phantom Limb but it's pretty good.

On the subject of grindcore, have you heard this album?



It will more than likely be right down your street, but it's only been out a week or two. It's early Peel sessions from Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror, Carcass, Bolt Thrower, Heresy and a couple more bands i forget off the top of my head. I'll be hunting down a download in the next few days probably.

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Last.FM | Echoes and Dust

jackhammer

I have the Carcass Peel sessions and the ENT Peel session I had on vinyl for years but the overall package looks stellar to me. As for Pig Destroyer, there was no order really. Phantom Limb is definitely my favourite.

Any thoughts on the Archive compilation people?

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Bulldog

I tried to download it a while back, but I'm a free user on MegaUpload, so it blocked my attempt.

/100% genuine excuse

I'm gonna give it another go now. I'll let you know what I think of it tomorrow probably.

EDIT: It's just done it again. Fuck's sake. I'll try again a little later.

NumberNineDream

I haven't downloaded the comp just because I have some of their albums already. But your review did push me to finally listen to them, and I got to say I really like them.

I've been through "Take my head" and "You all look the same to me" for now. The improvement is really obvious. I liked two tracks of "Take my Head", one of them is in the compilation. The other is "You make me feel" which is not as good as the title track.

About the other album, I loved almost every track in it. "Again" is truly epic, other really good tracks are "Finding it so Hard" and "Fool" (which is also on the comp). I think one of the setbacks would be "Now and Then", which really shows the lack of lyric originality their somehow corniness. Fortunately, that track is only 1:25, in contrast to their epic tracks of 15 minutes.

I still have many Archive albums to listen to.
Anyway, thanks for the review, very helpful.

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jackhammer

Again is truly sublime and quite frankly a masterpiece in my eyes. Noise is an album that needs to be checked out for sure.

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jackhammer

1998. I was already a father to my eldest son (1994) and about to become a father again (October 1998) and although I still loved music I wasn't really following what was going on due to parenthood and I was in a stasis. Music had taken a backseat and I was stuck in a rut. In this year I started a new career as a chef and was introduced to so much new music that my passion was reignited.

I hated Dance music with a passion and dismissed it as emotionally empty with the emphasis on commercial success and little effort regarding composition and songwriting. Then the album Mezzanine was thrust upon me. I was immediately blown away. I didn't need to be convinced of it's merits. I understood straight away that this was something special. I liked Electronic music but only regarding Ambient music (Tangerine Dream had been a fave for years) so when I heard Mezzanine my attitude towards Electronic music did a complete U turn. Here was an album with structure, emotion, power, melancholy, heaviness and repeated listenability.

The bassline of Angel kicks in insidiously before exploding into raw power and energy. The track Angel then begins with it's dark forbidding bassline juxtaposed with a simple elegant Guitar line and beautiful, mournful vocals. I was blown away and had to hear more. Finding that they had only 2 albums prior and both markedly different from each other was surprising but no less rewarding. The band's seminal Blue Lines (1991) was and still is a marker for sampling songs and creating a whole new sound whilst 1994's Protection already saw the band stretching their sound with guest vocalists and the inclusion of Dub, Reggae and unusual beats whilst still remaining highly original.

Listening to the band then made me delve into the more serious side of Electronic music and I was pleasantly surprised at the diversity and craft of artists that were as off mainstream as some of the music I knew and loved.

Since then I have developed a huge love of Trip Hop and indeed a hunger to hear as much Electronic music as I could which means that I enjoy DrumNBass, Glitch, Dubstep and many other sub genres due to this band.

Mezzanine is now quite rightly seen as a masterpiece and I feel fortunate enough to have been there when it blew away many pre concieved notions of the limitations of Electronic/ Dance music.

I cannot stress enough to you that if this sort of music isn't your thing then you are missing out on some truly superb music.

Have some vids:

Possibly the finest Dance track ever put down:

The absolutely gorgeous Protection with vocals by Tracy Thorn (EBTG):

Still one of the most intense songs I have ever heard:


EDIT: Vids sorted!

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Bulldog

Funnily enough, Massive Attack were basically my gateway into electronic dance as well, or at least they were my first brush with the whole concept of it (it normally takes me at least a couple of albums to get me into in a new area of music). It wasn't Mezzanine, but rather picking up a copy of Blue Lines second hand while I was skipping some class in college one day that gave me the push I needed.

Anyway, very good post sir! Thanks for reminding me to get hold or Protection as well. I take it your not a 100th Window fan? If not, I can hardly blame you!

FETCHER.

I find it fascinating that an electronic album that got you & bulldog, and some other into electronica, was one I hadn't heard up until a few months ago, anyways excellently reviewed Jackhammer, it was a good/interesting read .

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jackhammer

100th Window has become something of a grower for me and it deserves reappraising. Thanks for the comments peeps.

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Gavin B.

My story is similar. I was in a kind of musical limbo when I first heard Blue Lines back in 1991. I had spent decade and half broadcasting and dee jaying reggae music but the roots reggae scene was dying in Jamaica.

Things got even worse in the late 80s. Most of my cherished punk and post punk bands like the Clash, Gang of Four, Essential Logic, and the Slits were over and done with. The Mekons and the Fall struggled along selling almost no records. The New York and Boston scene was dead with all of the great bands like Mission of Burma, the Bush Tetras, the Lounge Lizards and the New York Dolls all dead and gone. All of the great Mississippi delta and Chicago blues singers were dead. And Elvis Costello, the one musician who made consistent albums throughout the 80s was producing a string of baffling and incoherent albums like Spike and Mighty Like A Rose and the Juliet Letters.

Massive Attack changed everything for me and got me interested in popular music again. Blue Lines was a pastiche of nearly every kind of music I liked including pop music, reggae, dub, hip hop, dee jay style, soul, punk and experimental music. Massive Attack music was innovative, visionary and unprecendented. Massive Attack was ground zero of the current post-rock electronica movement and the most important band of the 90s.

Ivo Watts-Russell's recording group This Mortal Coil was doing a similar thing in the 80s but his approach was a narrower gothic, dream pop form of electronica. Massive Attack was important because they managed to fuse all of those diverse currents to create a new musical beast . They opened my eyes to a new world of musical possibilities by smashing all of the categories and genres and building a whole new kind of musical form.