I am so wholly infatuated with this album. I've been listening to it since last December when Devin Townsend did a list of his top 10 favorite albums and because he has fantastic taste in music, I immediatly listened to everything I didn't already know. This was on that list.
I can't really describe the sound, sometimes it's like Cop Shoot Cop on Seroquel, sometimes it's just pure sweeping epic beauty with layers and little accents everywhere. All the words are by Alan Dubin (most known for Khanate, which also involves Plotkin) and all the music was written by James Plotkin (I hope you already know the name...), of whom I'm a burgeoning fantard. Between this and his work with Scorn, I really can't count him below God-tier.
This album blurs the line between organic and inorganic to me. The instruments listed are "vocoded voice, looped guitar, synth guitar, bass, tapes, rhythm machine and a drop of 303". The songs often begin on a fairly upbeat note, but slowly morph into introspective, spiraling, sometimes sad audio vortexes. The opening track, Last Look is a great example of that. I usually seek out really frightening, angry, aggressive electronic music, but this is really none of those things. It never feels heavy or weighed down despite the crashing, frequently relentless rhythm tracks. It can be spastic and some of the lyrics are rather dark, like the case of one of my favorite tracks, Thug. This song incidentally features the only party foul on the whole entire album: that weird grindcore breakdown cut and pasted right into the middle of it. It comes in awkwardly, but I like the way it warps back out and then returns to fade the song out. I think if it had integrated into the song more subtly, it wouldn't be a point of annoyance for so many listeners. I've come to just accept it, myself.
Speaking of Grindcore, that's what this band started out as. A Grindcore PARODY act. I don't really care for Grindcore most of the time and i find their earlier stuff to be unlistenable. But then they drop something like Break (You) which is probably the most beautiful thing ever written and I am not even exaggerating. Hear for yourself:
Are you fucking kidding me?
I have given you enough samples for you to gather what this album is like as a whole, and that's nice because I sure as hell can't describe it. It's distinctly 90's, but doesn't sound dated. It sounds futuristic, it sounds organic, it sounds like all kinds of different things and if nothing else, it is highly original. I've never heard anything like it before and in addition to it's complete hypnotic beauty, that's what I always look for in music: oddities and originality.
I expected this review to be a lot more capslocked and screamy and overly-excited, but now that I've sat down to write about this incredible piece of music, I'm at a loss for words. It's one of my all-time favorite albums ever recorded. I'm quite sure it's out of print, but there are plenty of copies to be found on Amazon or Discogs (if you wanna bother with that...) for only a couple dollars. This is an album you'll want a physical copy of.
Other random info:
http://plotkinworks.com/
http://www.discogs.com/Old-Formula/release/345084
http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/O.L.D./
Current incarnation.
Purchase dat sheeyit.
