Albums
Opening with the sounds of a party, like 'What's Going On,' this bewildering and beguiling debut album progresses less as a series of individual tracks, more a piece of continuous cut-and-paste composition. Marvin Gaye is not the only reference point. Like Daft Punk, the Avalanches have a genuine revisionist enthusiasm for gloriously unfashionable musical styles and artists; the Osmonds are sampled. So are Boney M. It's not a joke, either ' they mean it. Like British producers Aim or the Wiseguys, there lurks under the surface of this music the suspicion that their beat-literacy masks a less than real background, if you catch my drift.
But the fact that six men from Melbourne can evoke, in the course of one album, thoughts of Marvin Gaye, French disco, English hip hop and American west coast pop is pretty extraordinary. So this is an extraordinary record. The Avalanches have mastered a music where musicality and originality are not important. What matters is the love. The patchwork of samples and genuine authentic crackles on old records bear witness to a collective misspent adolescence rummaging in the record boxes of dusty old charity shops. You know they loved making this record, which after all is the best explanation for why you'll love listening to it.
Peter Brown
Forget everything we've ever said about Coldplay. And about Muse. And about Feeder. And about the Manics. Hell, forget even what we said about the Free Design. For this week, the contents of the Oxstu intray reached an all time low. Of all the music we get sent, so much is so painfully mundane that we stop to notice it. When we receive something as spectacularly awful as Boris' Absolutego ('Special Low Frequency Version', no less), therefore, it marks something of an event.
Delving through releases from the likes of Warp and Rephlex proves that electrical hum has been used to good effect in the musical avant garde. Even those couple of seconds at the start of 'Stand By Me' remain the only reason to consider listening to Be Here Now. After several minutes of relentless buzz, unchanging but for the odd fluctuation or occasional clatter of a drum, however, the effect seems to be on the wane. After seventy-four of them, it's enough to make you want to start breaking things.
Although being released five years after its actual recording, the question this raises is not so much why release it now, but rather why record it at all. There's probably some deep political message behind it that I just don't get, or perhaps Boris are on a mission to push human endurance to its limits. Maybe they just take a lot of drugs. Whatever, there are better ways of getting your message across than by making a strong contender for the worst album of all time.
Ian Stonebridge
In interview with Tim Westwood recently Rev. Run was full of enthusiasm for Run DMC as a group, rap as a genre, and music in general. It's a pity then that Crown Royal comes across as an attempt to pimp the group's name and fan base, playing off Run DMC's unassailable position in hip hop history and culture and a glut of guest appearances from latest flavours-of-the-month to rake in Arista more cash.
The album is far from terrible it's just... boring. 'Inoffensive' would hardly be a crushing criticism in isolation, but when compared to recent impressively fresh sounding work by De La Soul, or the amazingly innovative Outkast, Run DMC seem to have abdicated their claims to the Crown Royal.
Brendan Rolle-Rowan
26th Apr 2001