I was quite taken with the Bass-O-Matic album, cringe though the band name is
In the review, I make that cardinal rockcrit error of looking for the dance artist who can sustain at album level. Writing still from outside the culture at this point (October 1990, a year before the Conversion).
A similar sort of conceptual-ideological blunder was made in my review of Bomb the Bass's Unknown Territory, and this time it's only a couple of months away from Seeing the Light - the Damascene experience at Progeny
Bomb The Bass
Unknown Territory
Melody Maker, August 17 1991
We need a new category – something like "progressive dance", or prog funk – to describe the new post-acieed groups like 808 Slate, Bass-O-Matic and The Shamen, who are as effective at album length as they are in the condensed format of the club-targetted 12-inch. Coming an unaccountably long time after the Into The Dragon debut, Unknown Territory is a great advance in the cause of dance albums that aren't just the singles plus a heap of filler.
Unknown Territory also shows the extent to which the post-house revolution is a reprise or resurrection of the avant-funk of the early Eighties. Ideas first explored by the likes of A Certain Ratio, Byrne and Eno, 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire, On U Sound, Material et al, have migrated from the margins to the mainstream, in the process swapping their dank and forbidding aura of "subversion" for hedonistic, populist appeal.
'Throughout The Entire World', the opener, is as pan-global as its title suggests, mixing an Afro-centric cauldron of funk ferment with bamboo music trills and pipings. 'Switching Channels' is a murderous miscegenation of rock and hip hop; pyrotechnical guitar licks lash and singe a tapestry of magisterially interwoven and inter-bled samples. 'Love So True' is marred a little by the focal effect of the soul-rich vocals, but its sensurround soundscape opens up your senses like a night-time stroll in a rainforest, every corner of the mix murmuring and quivering with detail.
'Winter In July' you should know and adore by now: the rustling canopies of Gamelan chimes, the heartquake bass, the jewel-encrusted, ambient swathes. Would that the melody was sung in Icelandic or Liz Fraser-ese, for it's only the ungainly homilies and sound advice of the lyrics that hold this back from divinity.
'You See Me In 3D' is marauding, voracious techno-funk, 'Liquid Metal' a furore of drum machine mayhem. 'Run Baby Run' is swaggering rock/house, its soundscape honeycombed with enclaves of uncanny acoustics and pockmarked with perplexing sounds. 'Understand This' toils and bubbles, spraying raucous rockist blare in the style of Public Enemy's '911 Is A Joke' and 'You're Gonna Get Yours'. 'The Air You Breathe' reprises the crater-bass currents and hymnal poignancy of 'Winter In July', but isn't quite as molten and majestic.
On the CD, there's a drastic rewrite of 'Winter' as sweltering jungle-funk, topped with a tangled lattice of humid, jazzy pipes. 'Pressure Point' is the only lapse into the unacceptable side of the "prog" connection, being a jam session between drum machines, defaced by ugly guitar solos. With a clinical metal riff reminiscent of Clail's 'Human Nature', this track will doubtless end up, like so much prog rock, as the theme tune for a sports programme.
Best comes last, with 'Moody', a brilliant version of a forgotten classic by early Eighties avant-funk group ESG, an all-female unit who were likened at the time to a cross between Motown and Public Image Limited. With its costive bass lines and clipped, glowering vocals, the superbly baleful and tensile 'Moody' was a prototype for house music.
On Unknown Territory, Tim Simenon's avant-funk roots are showing, and 'Moody' confirms and acknowledges the connection. Yesterday's "unknown territory" is contemporary chartpop's terra firma.
The technorave-chillout yen for Pink Floyd is worth a mini-essay - wasn't there some ambient house (89-90 phase) track that samples "Wish You Were Here"? Consults faded regions of the back brain - ah yes, Innocence, "Natural Thing"
The Orb obviously....
The KLF too.
And there was an ardkore track by the wonderfully named E that interpolated from The Wall - "Nobody's Home", the line "I've got a little black book with my poems in" became "oi! I've got a little black disk with me tune on it", and I think a bit of David Gilmour soloing also got sampled at the end. It's the first tune here
The technoptimism of this end of '80s /start of '90s moment is endearing - painfully poignant too, considering all that has happened since, from world stuff to the "bright promise of digital technology" going rancid.
All this stuff - Shamen and Deeelite particularly, but also The Grid, Adamski, Bomb the Bass, Coldcut, The Orb, KLF, 808 State , Underworld, Humanoid / very early Future Sound of London etc, One Dove, Hypnotone, ie. for the most part house music made by former rock people - all of it flashes me back to smart drinks, flotation tanks, Mondo 2000, Terence McKenna books, Nicholas Saunders, Fraser Clark, "zippies", etc etc
These blogs are Ciccone-free zones but "Ray Of Light" was one of Madonna's more bearable singles. I hope William made a lot of money off it and the album.
This is an Orbit tune the heads love
I am not sure I ever traced the William Orbit trail back to Torch Song
Joy pipes up: "I loved that song! I didn't know it was William Orbit!"
She thinks she must have heard it at Danceteria.
