Albums Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman - Ravenous Soundtrack
Massive Attack - Protection
This Heat - This Heat
Source (purchased/given/borrowed/the wife's): purchased
Date Purchased: 1999/ 1994/ May 3, 2006
Original Review: N/A
Thoughts/Memories/ Remembrances:
Ravenous Soundtrack - In my last year working at the student newspaper, we received a press portfolio for the film, which itself was a pretty creative piece of work, with it's paper looking pulpy and withered (oh it was high gloss but printed to look like it was old) and blood splatters and bits of flesh adorning some pages. The high-gloss photos of Guy Pierce, Robert Carlyle, Jeremy Davies and crew made this mid-19th century tale of cannibalism look bizarrely appealing. After seeing the movie, it became instantly one of my favourites. Darkly humourous and rife with flawed characters, curious supernaturalism and some brilliant twists. In lesser hands it would have been a cheesy splatterfest, but director Antonia Bird crafted a reserved, but highly suggestive work of ingeniousness. Upon hearing "Boyd's Journey", the track playing during the opening credit sequence, I knew I had to have the soundtrack, assembled by Blur's Damon Albarn and master composer Michael Nyman. It's as irreverent as the film, melding askew instrumentation with traditional score fare, and the score remains as beloved as the movie. (Aside: I can't believe the film's website is still on-line, but it's awesome)
Protection - I've been trying to choose my re-review CDs at random, however sometimes I pull a disc off the shelf that I just don't want to listen to. But then again, that should be all the more reason to force myself to pull it down and give it a go. That's what happened with Massive Attack's sophomoric release here, an album I played to death over a two year period between 1994 and 1996. My CD collection at that time was just beginning, and Massive Attack's Protection was one of my crown jewels. I was agog over Trip Hop for much of the mid-'90s, taking elements of hip hop, dance, downtempo electronica, dub and jazz and blending them in a truly innovative way. Unfortunately trip-hop burned itself out by around 1998, or at least I was quite done with it by then. I haven't really listened to this (or any other Massive Attack, Tricky, Morcheeba, etc) album for a long time and I don't know how it'll play anymore. I have a pretty strong personal attachment to it, since it was one of my formative albums, really defining my taste in music, but, yeah, I don't really want to look back at it.
This Heat - I bought only one album from New York's Other Music store back in 2000 but have been receiving their new release emails every week since. Featuring audio clips, the Other Music Weekly Release email became my main source for a number of years at the beginning of this decade for hearing new music. It's where I heard this, and from the basis of one track I sought out this album (finding it locally at SoundScapes a few weeks later) and was pretty nonplussed with it. The one track I heard, I kind of enjoyed, but the rest of the album is early-80's (it's a reissue) sparse avant-garde-ism, a mix of noise and silence. I didn't really give it much of a chance, having pretty immediately regretted its purchase upon first listen. Wonder how it'll do on fresh ears nearly 2 years later?
Massive Attack - Protection
This Heat - This Heat
Source (purchased/given/borrowed/the wife's): purchased
Date Purchased: 1999/ 1994/ May 3, 2006
Original Review: N/A
Thoughts/Memories/ Remembrances:
Ravenous Soundtrack - In my last year working at the student newspaper, we received a press portfolio for the film, which itself was a pretty creative piece of work, with it's paper looking pulpy and withered (oh it was high gloss but printed to look like it was old) and blood splatters and bits of flesh adorning some pages. The high-gloss photos of Guy Pierce, Robert Carlyle, Jeremy Davies and crew made this mid-19th century tale of cannibalism look bizarrely appealing. After seeing the movie, it became instantly one of my favourites. Darkly humourous and rife with flawed characters, curious supernaturalism and some brilliant twists. In lesser hands it would have been a cheesy splatterfest, but director Antonia Bird crafted a reserved, but highly suggestive work of ingeniousness. Upon hearing "Boyd's Journey", the track playing during the opening credit sequence, I knew I had to have the soundtrack, assembled by Blur's Damon Albarn and master composer Michael Nyman. It's as irreverent as the film, melding askew instrumentation with traditional score fare, and the score remains as beloved as the movie. (Aside: I can't believe the film's website is still on-line, but it's awesome)Protection - I've been trying to choose my re-review CDs at random, however sometimes I pull a disc off the shelf that I just don't want to listen to. But then again, that should be all the more reason to force myself to pull it down and give it a go. That's what happened with Massive Attack's sophomoric release here, an album I played to death over a two year period between 1994 and 1996. My CD collection at that time was just beginning, and Massive Attack's Protection was one of my crown jewels. I was agog over Trip Hop for much of the mid-'90s, taking elements of hip hop, dance, downtempo electronica, dub and jazz and blending them in a truly innovative way. Unfortunately trip-hop burned itself out by around 1998, or at least I was quite done with it by then. I haven't really listened to this (or any other Massive Attack, Tricky, Morcheeba, etc) album for a long time and I don't know how it'll play anymore. I have a pretty strong personal attachment to it, since it was one of my formative albums, really defining my taste in music, but, yeah, I don't really want to look back at it.
This Heat - I bought only one album from New York's Other Music store back in 2000 but have been receiving their new release emails every week since. Featuring audio clips, the Other Music Weekly Release email became my main source for a number of years at the beginning of this decade for hearing new music. It's where I heard this, and from the basis of one track I sought out this album (finding it locally at SoundScapes a few weeks later) and was pretty nonplussed with it. The one track I heard, I kind of enjoyed, but the rest of the album is early-80's (it's a reissue) sparse avant-garde-ism, a mix of noise and silence. I didn't really give it much of a chance, having pretty immediately regretted its purchase upon first listen. Wonder how it'll do on fresh ears nearly 2 years later?
Re-Reviews:
Ravenous Soundtrack - at times big and orchestral, at times like a small band of travelling instrumentalists, this soundtrack is -- thanks to Albarn's oblique musical sensibility -- quite unique. Nyman and Albarn make use of bombastic horns and strings, as well as period instruments like squeezeboxes, jew's harp and banjo. Plucked guitars, plinking pianos, sharp snares and deeply resonant kettle drums and bongos are mixed with sounds of clanking metal and throat singers to create vastly different atmospheres. Moments of high tensions are juxtaposed with uncomfortable relaxation. There's tracks that emphasize movement, whether moderately-paced travelling or rapid chase sequences, and there's tracks that simply haunt and linger. At times there's a very classic, low-tech feel, traditional and suitable to the trading post and pioneer eras, and at other times it becomes something so crafty and modern, but never betraying the primitive (relatively speaking) setting of the film. The score highlights the action, the tension, the horror, blackness and humour of the film so perfectly, entirely complimentary but also capable of standing on its own. It's still one of the absolute best film scores I've come across.Protection - I want to be bored with this album. I want it to sound dated and tired and feel readily capable of disposing of it. Unfortunately, it's just too damn well put together. The songs are each richly layered full of immaculately compiled sounds and though production values make up most of it, the spots of guitars, the orchestral strings or piano are integrated flawlessly. A trio at the time (Tricky Kid, 3-D and Daddy G), they were groundbreaking and still, for all their emulators, few could replicate the intensity and occasional beauty of this album, surpassed in its genre only by their follow-up, Mezzanine. Much credit has to be given to Massive Attack's vocal collaborators mainly Tracy Thorn and Nicolette. I'm so intimately familiar with each of these songs, their lyrics and nuances coming back to me upon re-listening for the first time in years. I have to admit that, yes, I'm bored with the album, in the sense that I don't desire to listen to it ever, and yet, putting it on numerous times over the past two weeks, each song still sucks me into its hazy cloud.
This Heat - This Heat evolved from no real scene, but rather coming out of Brixton via John Peel in the late 1970's, fusing garage-band and DIY-production with avant garde fuzz, like the bastard offspring of Sonny Sharrock's anti-jazz. Cutting and splicing tape loops and avoiding any sense of polish, This Heat, their self-titled release from 1979 (re-released back in '06) is an experimental musicologist's fantasy album. Lingering moments of sparse soundscapes (with clarinets, violas, bells, garbage percussives and an array of haunting vocal loops) can later be heard in places like Bjork's albums, the bass driven tracks drive one to think of Primus, and the more rhythmic experiments figure into the burgeoning krautrock scenes made big by Kraftwork and would later feed into the crunchier electronic-scapes of Autechre and Aphex Twin. Never afraid to let their tracks play out, many break the 5 minute mark, some would say intolerably. It's certainly not easy or unassuming, it demands you either pay attention or turn it off. This album sounds in part like a band that's trying to find a sound and in part like an experiment in song structure and sound manipulation, but it's utterly unique and, to the proper ear, fascinating.
Rating (keep/sell/undecided): Ravenous Soundtrack - keep; Protection - sell; This Heat - undecided.
Ravenous Trailer
Massive Attack - "Protection"
This Heat Live (part 1)