Cars and girls: You really can't beat it as a pop song theme/concept/aim. This is a vibe but I feel like it's a lost vibe and it crushes my soul that we all aren't striving to be living this romantic carefree feeling on a daily basis in 2024.
Then when you actually have a think about the lyrics its really kinda sad and not particularly care free. This dude's spent a year and a day thinking about a girl he hardly even had a romance with. She's all he can think about while he's in his car... yet there's a romantic innocence to it all and it seems a bit like he enjoys ridin' in his car thinking about this girl and a love that could have been. Also he seems to really like riding in his car.
Anyway what a bittersweet tune. It's pop perfection innit.
A frantic Amen smasher with supreme ghostly eeriness followed by otherworldly change up at 3.11. An industrial dub bass line, philosophical sci-fi dialogue and cracking choppage until its all engulfed into the pitch darkness. Atmosphere provided by two Jean-Michel Jarre samples.
Chimeira - Deeper Life (Northern Connexion Remix) - (1994)
Classic 94 jungle bizniz (....er sorry but I couldn't help it). Top Amen choppage with added mental pitch-shifted drummage, beautiful bass booms and spectacular time-stretched diva.
Chimeira - I've Got What You Need (1994)
The flip was minimal, meticulous and moody. Rimshot choppage, sneaky skedaddle snares, soothing sub bass plus excellent backwards bits. Total atmosphere without resorting to a long note for five minutes.
Now for some more rumbling bass. This time from the noise-y bass drones and synth sludge of Salem. For a couple of minutes in 08/09 Salem were the most exciting new group on the planet. Frost is still infectious with its occult drones, electro surges, delirious trap beats, insane low end and windy ghost vocals.
Redlights - Salem (2008/2010)
Even if the hipster faux sordid degeneracy image of the group was way too retarded for you it was impossible to deny a pop tune like Redlights. When I say pop tune, I mean a droning hypnagogic haze of a goth-shoegaze-trap anthem. All of the hypnotic ethereal incantations, grinding bass waves and maximum haunted synth sludge.
King Night (2010)
Drum machine rattling trap beats, a distorted haunted choir in a cyclonic squall, dense layers of menacing sombre synths and blasts of blurry in the red bass. King Night is an audacious apocalyptic cathedral of woozy sound.
Now for more bass rumble in a more stripped down elemental electronic style. Plastic Star is phenomenal brutal minimal electro techno-rock. Maximum impact from seemingly little input. The children of Pan Sonic, why wasn't there a thousand more...
Extraordinary track really. They make it look so easy...
I've been playing these jungle/dnb tunes to test out the capacity of these new speakers I got. Having proper bass in my ears seems so deluxe and extravagant in this day and age of not having great quality or beautiful things anymore from cars to shoes to clothes to music to movies to journalism to all the ugly new houses, streets, towns and suburbs and the ugly fuckin' wind/solar farms. Ugly lack of style and quality disguised as refinement. It's just cheap, low expectations, demoralising. Everything has had its bar lowered due to the bottom line and is just not as good as it should and used to be. The demise is here and no-one's even trying to elevate to a higher level. It's like they can't even imagine it so it's just pound shop world. So these speakers which aren't even high end posh have given me some respite amongst the infinite greyness.
Here's another track and I know it's just not hardcore anymore and the jungle is heading into the dnb but the luxurious atmosphere here is undeniably soothing & sweet along with the awesome deep sub bass and good choppage.
The "Music's Hypnotising" vocal sample was so ubiquitous by this stage it was a cliche in dance tunes, having already been used in many a house, freestyle, garage, bleep and breakbeat hardcore classic from the ultra underground to the chart-busting mainstream. Actually I think it had already been used in a jungle/dnb, maybe 4Hero, tune so PFM wasn't even the first to use it in this new paradigm.
Raw Silk - Do It To The Music (1982)
Speaking of luxurious, this is where the vocal snippet "Music's Hypnotising" comes from. An impeccable slice of early 80s funky post-disco. Peak boogie.
Psychotropic - Only For The Headstrong (1990)
The best use of the Raw Silk Music's Hypnotising sample in my book. Is it house, bleep or early hardcore or an intersection thereof. This is something else whatever it is. Dreamy, hypnotic yet real rough, barely functioning. Absolutely fascinating artefact. Hang on! Somebody in the comments on discogs nails it: Tranquil Hardcore.
DJ Massive - Hypnotiser (For The Ladies) (1993)
More music's hypnotising samples. The hardcore rave aesthetic going into 93 seems a bit late but the insanity here is infectious. Sirens, crazy beats, bleeps, some kind of chicken dance and check out that deep torpedoing sub bass.
4hero - People Always Criticise Us (1994)
Ok this has become way too trainspotter-y! So actually 4Hero sample the line before Music's Hypnotising where it apparently says No time for criticising but it's in the same melody as Hypnotising in this remarkable state of the art tune where nothing seems to actually happen. I guess an ambient stillness is achieved. A blank feeling in the air.
This is pitched black post-apocalypse jungle. Some wicked choppage but any kind of will to survive is thwarted by a dysphoric bleakness that just hangs in the air poisoning everything in its wake. Strange. Quite an achievement.
Where the ambient jungle becomes the drum and bass but it's still good. Wash Over Me was a played out in 94 tune but not released until 95. The beginning of where the beats don't so much smash but roll, still it is an Amen. Plenty of new age-y sounds with a great flute bit in there.
A DJ Crystl alias MI5 did just the one 12". I Can't Understand/Experience was maybe the last great thing he ever recorded after a stellar run of 12"ers from 92-94. This is a heavier yet more spacey sound than usual. Sometimes the drummage with the double kicks goes toward a metal style or somewhere a bit like ex-metal ambient dub of Scorn. There's some vocal science with a a haunted female(?) so disembodied that it feels lonely. Like it's out on the precipice alone, cold and coming down. Yet there's a warm ambient synth and womblike sub-bass comfort. An inherent paradoxical aesthetic was always part of the charm of ambient jungle but this is definitely on the darker side of darkside.
People go on about European electro-pop and disco with pioneers like Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, Numan and what have you but do ABBA ever get seriously noticed when it comes to innovation and just plain peak state of the art sound... I dunno. They were always doing something weird or dark in the background that you might not have noticed on initial listening.
Here's a quote from Carl Magnus Palm taken from his book ABBA: The Complete Recording Sessions (1994):
"Lay All Your Love on Me is known for a descending vocal sound at the end of the verse immediately preceding the refrain. This was achieved by sending the vocal into a harmoniser device, which was set up to produce a slightly lower-pitched version of the vocal. In turn its output was fed back to its input, thereby continually lowering the pitch of the vocal. Andersson and Ulvaeus felt that the chorus of the song sounded like a hymn, so parts of the vocals in the choruses were run through a [[vocoder]], to recreate the sound of a church congregation singing, slightly out of tune."
When listening on the hi-fi or through headphones all manner of unusual spooky shit reveals itself. That's pre-DJ Screw shadowy chopped and screwed shenanigans at the end of the verses innit. Then, I mean, a church choir deliberately being made to sound slightly wrong without you actually realising is pretty perverse, unnerving and kinda sinister. This deleterious to your unassuming mind chicanery is similar to the psychological games that certain scenes in horror movies play upon you.
This is surprisingly almost very good. I mean it feels like it's gonna go interstellar at any minute but just kind of wimps out with some weak drumming that just doesn't coalesce into the great crescendo you were wishing for but its got hints of past genius in there and sounds a bit like it coulda been on See You On The Other Side (1995). Maybe it needs to be considered just low key not bad for a couple of old fellas.
I'm still getting over the fact that they'll never be the same as David Baker era Mercury Rev but hey he only left the band thirty years ago. It's not like I didn't love post-Baker cds See You On The Other Side, Deserters Songs and half of All Is A Dream though. Two of my favourite early Mercury Rev tunes Blood On The Moon and Frittering were Johnathan and Grasshopper sans David songs anyway.
Blood On The Moon - Mercury Rev (1990)
This was on the the bonus disc Lego My Ego which was included on a later 1992 version of the Yerself Is Steam cd. I think this is Grasshopper on lead vocals.
Frittering - Mercury Rev (1991)
Hang on, remember this classic! Frittering is an ecstatic blast of a tune. Reinventing the psychedelic space-rock jam for the 90s, Mercury Rev absolutely kill it here and it still sounds fucking great. The ravishing 5.17 moment when mind blowing lift off begins is well worth the wait. When euphoria was the goal and the possibilities seemed endless.