indarknessletmedwell
ezOP
Posts: 22
(4/3/04 2:02 pm)
Reply
|
All Music Guide reviews (Psychic TV)
The following reviews are taken from the website www.allmusic.com - the copyright belongs to AEC One Stop Group. Please visit the All Music site for more information.
FORCE THE HAND OF CHANCE:
The first Psychic TV album in many ways remains its best, a double album worthy of the space needed that's readily comparable to the best efforts of the World Serpent circle of acts like Current 93 and Coil in its variety, dark power and very English take on things. Admittedly the Coil (and therefore Throbbing Gristle) connection is further heightened by the participation of Peter Christopherson throughout, while Alex Fergusson's reemergence after time spent with Alternative TV further heightens the overall musical excellence of the album. Add in some fine guest performers — most notably Marc Almond, who appears on the winsome pop of "Stolen Kisses" and the slow burning, threatening mood piece "Guiltless" — and Genesis P-Orridge would have had to work damn hard to screw everything up, which he certainly didn't. The opening track alone must have confounded more than a few Throbbing Gristle fanatics — "Just Drifting (For Caresse)" is a slow folk song with gentle string backing written for and about P-Orridge's newborn daughter. The musical references throughout the album refer to everything from Ennio Morricone-styled spaghetti western twang and doom ("Terminus-Xtul," which eventually transforms into a grinding howl of feedback and a calm acoustic coda) to post-punk dance grooves ("Ov Power," in a 'radio promo mix' that's still not entirely American Bandstand material). Bachir Attar and the Master Musicians of Jajouka get a direct salute with "Thee Full Pack," which while not representative of that collective's music still sets a haunting, mysterious mood. The Temple ov Psychick Youth coterie doubtless still gets a kick out of "Message from Thee Temple," in which an authoritative but warm voice quietly delivers some philosophical strictures against a rich, sorrowful combination of strings and low key beats. — Ned Raggett
DREAMS LESS SWEET:
Their second album, released in 1983, Dreams Less Sweet fluctuates between industrial pieces and heavily orchestrated pop, employing exotic instruments like the Tibetan thighbone in additon to a number of found sounds. — Jason Ankeny
THEMES 2:
This second in a series of ritualistic music offers another dose of instrumental music that veers to the more experimental and varied side of Psychic TV, though in some ways it is also quite different from Themes. Whereas the first album consisted of ethno-forgeries on mostly acoustic instruments like clarinet, piano, bicycle wheel, and Tibetan human thighbones, Themes, Vol. 2 adds in far more technology, from tape loops to feedback. Much of the music on this album was composed for videos by experimental filmmaker Derek Jarmen. The album opens with "Loops of the Mystical Union," inspired by early 20th century classical avant-garde composer Alexander Scriabin. This fascinating track uses a loop from one of his orchestral works to create a long drone while squalls of guitar (violin?) feedback ripple through, and towards the end the feedback hits with buzz-saw intensity. Following this extreme the record goes into a completely different mood with "Elipse of Flowers," a relaxed, melancholic piece with guitar, chimes, and a slow primitive drumbeat. The piece ends on a disturbing note with a loop of some creepy mutated laughter, and the same loop continues on side two of the LP to create the base of a sinister soundtrack. Eventually the evil laughter becomes more distorted by echo effects and then this is replaced by looped chanting that becomes a bed over which an unidentifiable wind instrument and other strange sounds can be heard. This dark record is one of Psychic TV's more adventuresome offerings, and the CD even extends the tracks and adds a wealth of newer material. — Rolf Semprebon
CITY OV PARIS:
One of the seemingly endless series of live albums Psychic TV released in the '80s, City ov Paris was recorded right where it says it was, with a six person lineup of Genesis P-Orridge, his wife Paula, Alex Fergusson, and three others. With a slightly muddy mix to its (dis)credit — P-Orridge is barely audible when sticking to a low-key speak sing mode — it's probably not essential in the end for hyper-fans, and certainly isn't the best place for a newcomer, but it's still got many rewarding moments for those willing to give it a try. At its best, the performance reaches the level of careening chaos P-Orridge has so often wanted to make his own, building up to an explosive conclusion with "Soul Eater." "She Touched Me" may have a fairly calm arrangement, but his vocals add in all the extreme nature needed, while the extreme vocal tweaking on "Riot in Thee Eye Ov Sky" could easily be used to summon demons if desired. Fergusson gets in some great guitar work towards the end of the album, while the whole band sounds unsurprisingly on-point, given the amount of concerts they were performing regularly at the time. A couple of pieces are little more than products of their time and place — the opening number, "Thee Degenerate," isn't all that potentially horrifying, though the wolf-howl samples sometimes transcend their cheesy use. The crowd certainly gets into it, however — "Dark Powers" essentially consists of little more than the band chanting along to some muffled beats, though it sounds like an experience best done on site rather than heard after the fact. The CD version of the album provides a little bit of extra frustration, as it was mastered as one track straight through. — Ned Raggett
JACK THE TAB - TEKNO ACID BEAT:
In one of the most unexpected but perversely prescient moves of Genesis P-Orridge's entire career, he stumbled across the stream of house and techno classics coming out of the Detroit and Chicago scenes in the eighties, hooked up with psych revivalist/writer Richard Norris and created the double-disc Jack the Tab collection. Packaged as a compilation but actually only made by Norris and P-Orridge plus a few cohorts (including Norris's collaborator in the Grid, Dave Ball), Jack the Tab may be an indulgence rather than a way of life but in its own way is a fun if extremely of-its-time release. If there's any particular element of note, it's the wide range of samples used throughout, with the two raiding everything from psych exploitation movies and random spoken word rants to pepper the various grooves. Derrick May and Juan Atkins really had nothing to worry about per se, partially because the emphasis is less full-on techno than a variety of breakbeat and collage exercises, but in ways Jack the Tab smartly parallels the try-everything melange of contemporaneous Meat Beat Manifesto. Tracks like "Rapid Bliss" and "Liquid Eyeliner" have plenty of the disorienting flow of Jack Dangers' work (and the latter has an outrageously great Kraftwerk steal as well). One of the creepier moments —- less for the music than the samples — has Mark David Chapman detailing his reasons for shooting John Lennon while a line from the Beatles' "Happiness is a Warm Gun" is constantly looped. Perhaps the killer track in retrospect is the brief industrial stumble "Aquarius Rising," which notably samples Peter Fonda's dialogue snippet from The Wild Angels ("We want to be free! We want to do what we want to do!") a couple of years before Primal Scream's "Loaded" made it deservedly famous. — Ned Raggett
ALLEGORY AND SELF:
Beginning with "Godstar," Psychic TV's tribute to Brian Jones complete with Stonesy guitar licks, Allegory and Self balances surprisingly straight-ahead alternative pop with more experimental tracks using tape cut-ups or extended synthesizer freeforms. P-Orridge makes for quite an ambitious frontman, crooning like Love and Rockets' Daniel Ash on "We Kiss" and producing a series of guttural roars for "Southern Comfort." "She Was Surprised" even bears the first fruits of Psychic TV's fixation with sampladelic acid-house. It may not be characteristic Psychic TV (if such an animal exists), but Allegory and Self may well be the best introduction for beginners. — John Bush
THEE CITY OV TOKYO/THEE CITY OV NEW YORK:
Combining two separate live releases onto one disc, Thee City ov Tokyo/Thee City ov New York is a bit disjointed by its nature, in that the latter performance came from four years before the former, but it's still a good combined listen as it stands. The New York tracks, originally appearing on the New York Scum Haters tape, will be of interest to more than PTV fans given the participation of both Peter Christopherson and Geoff Rushton. The first adds tape and voice, the latter guitar and violin, and in combination with the P-Orridge/Alex Fergusson core and John Gosling makes for an extremely screwy and often sonically violent melange. Agonizing screams (and sometimes comical ones) snake through crackling, shuddering rhythms and heavy echo, while "Oi You Skinhead!" is a total death march Black Sabbath could be proud of. Then there's what sounds like a bunch of random samples from street vendors on "New York Sin," but somehow that seems only appropriate in context (as does the not-quite-a-cover version of the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning"). The Tokyo tracks reflect the time of recording well enough — a sprightly version of "I Like You" shows that the band's turn towards psych-pop/rock was an inspired touch — but it's still hardly a conventional show by any means. An 11-minute run through the collage/jam of "Supermale" and the part-way-to-early-Roxy Music burble and moan of "E L-O-V-E U" show that much. There's also the utterly goofy (and not entirely patronizing, but still) "Japan Boy," apparently written for the show there and a merry enough little groove, though P-Orridge's slurred singing rather undercuts the effect. — Ned Raggett
PEAK HOUR:
Peak Hour continues in the acid house vein that Psychic TV pioneered on Jack the Tab, though if anything the psychedelic elements are even stronger on this record. Electro beats and trippy electronic sounds conspire with weird vocal loops and other effects to make some of the most psychedelic dance music since early Funkadelic. Most tracks are upbeat full-throttle rhythm numbers, though not quite as fast on the bpms as the bone-crunching rhythms of the current techno rave music which grew out of acid house. Though Peak Hour is a little more cohesive in its blessed-out grooves than the pseudo-compilations Jack the Tab and Ultrahouse, it doesn't have quite as much bite and humor, though it still throws in a few curve balls. "Dreamlined" is a collage of weird noises and soundbites, with some electronic sci-fi blips and swoops thrown in. "Pain" has some heavily distorted singing, while "Re-Mind" starts off in dance-rhythm mode only to speed up at the end into hyper-rhythms. It makes for some interesting dance music that also works as "head" music, though maybe not the most innovative work that Psychic TV has done. — Rolf Semprebon
HEX SEX - SINGLES PART 1:
The pop end of Psychic TV gets the full treatment with this singles collection, released on the Cleopatra label, including faithful covers of '60s standards like the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" and Serge Gainsbourg' "Je T'aime Non Plus," culture-icon tributes "Roman P." and "Godstar" plus later singles like "Hex Sex" and "Love War Riot." Though Genesis P-Orridge's vocals are occasionally tuneless, Hex Sex is a good summation of one of the more bizarre "pop" bands of the '80s. — John Bush
GODSTAR - SINGLES PART 2:
Godstar was meant to be a "best-of" for fans without access to Genesis P-Orridge's constant output of music in the 1980s. By cutting away the excess that haunts most Psychic TV albums, what is revealed is how original and creative a force they had the potential to be. All three versions of the title track work as fitting tributes to former Rolling Stones bassist Brian Jones, while their cover of the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" is a charged, vibrant undertaking of a pop classic. But nothing on the album compares to the sprawling "Roman P (Sordide Sentimental Mix)," the drug-fueled centerpiece. Droning on for almost ten minutes with continued intensity, it builds into a psychedelic epic, colored with noisy guitar solos and tribal drum beats. Some may be offset by P-Orridge's blatant shock tactics ("Neurology" features samples of Charles Manson and Jim Jones in opposing stereo channels) and the album's lack of continuity, but fans of creative electronic music will find this to be a good introduction to an important artist. — Bradley Torreano
THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES:
Five years of Psychic TV (1987-1992) are examined in this two-CD sampler packaged in Psychic TV's trademark exploitation of the power of the vulgar image. This is the first of a three-part series chronicling the group. Ten of the 21 tracks are previously unreleased. "Infinite Beat" and succeeding tracks identify Psychic TV as primogenitors of electronica, creative sampling and the club mix while flirting with psychological principles of mind control. Such is the typical combination of outre and superficially commercial material that is the Psychic TV fare and guaranteed to maintain their cult following. It is certainly no understatement to say that without this group's envelope-pushing fusion of machines and rock instrumentation you could never have gotten to the now thoroughly explored realms of acid house and techno. A 30-page, full-color booklet details each track with text from the mind of founding member, Genesis P-Orridge (also of pre-industrial noise experimenters Throbbing Gristle). Allowing full immersion of this suggestive, cryptic, neo-psychedelic beat music is truly a mind altering experience. A couple hours after partaking of these doses, one can be assured that Psychic TV aspired, and often succeeded at, employing guitars, drums, keyboards and sequenced sounds toward recreating an expansive, hallucinogenic, paradigm-challenging drug experience...that you can dance to. — Thomas Schulte
|
Email This To a Friend
Topic Commands
Click to receive email notification of replies 
Click to stop receiving email notification of replies