A great follow up to their first Christian garage-rock album. The one is even scuzzier and louder and ends with a great tune whose lyrics consist of Mike Lucas rabidly speaking in tongues. Praise the Lord! The Knights have saved me with their scuzz-rock brand of Christendom. Hallelujah!
The title does a good job in describing this release. Kirk seems to have shifted away from sequenced sounds and more toward found beats and loops. He uses the same samples again and again throughout this CD to a different effect each time. Each track is like a variation on a theme. While not as hypnotic as his first few electronica CDs, this is still some good stuff.
Cabaret Voltaire’s final album ended with a dazzling, CD filling track that drifted between various sonic themes and styles, yet maintained enough of a consistency to justify it being a single piece. Agents With False Memories is a similar attempt at creating an epic electronica composition but it falls short. There’s just not enough variety here. The beats and music hardly change during the course of the entire 45 minutes. The only real variety is in the mass of found lo-fi voices that are overlaid on the mix.
The Big Doll House is a 70s women-in-prison film which featured Pam Grier in more of a supporting role. The film is fairly trashy (as one might expect) but it was on the dull side. The acting is really bad. I mean REALLY bad… to the point of seeming like it was intentional. You know it’s pretty bad when Harry the fruit cart guy is the most convincing performance.
Fallout 1 and 2 are two of my favorite computer games. Those games had a great style to them, engaging post-apocalyptic story lines and a great turn-based combat system. Fallout 3 is a worthy 3-D successor to those games that falls short only in its game combat mechanics. At first glance Fallout 3 looks like a first person shooter. You can try to play it that as a standard shooter but you will soon find out that it’s an awful FPS. Fortunately, the game has a pseudo turn-based combat system in which you can pause the action and spend “action points” to attack specific parts of an enemy’s anatomy. This works out pretty well although the combat is nowhere near as deep as it was in the original 2-D games.
However, Fallout is much more than just killing things. The devastated Washington D.C. area is a great environment to explore. There are tons of little areas to discover. I finished the game with about a third of the map left to explore and I am already going back and seeing what I can find. The quests and character interactions are usually pretty entertaining and filled with a nice, black sense of humor. The role-playing aspects are there, but you don’t spend you time worrying much about your stats and leveling up. The game as a gentle difficulty curve and even if you get off track you feel like you are accomplishing something.
After the end of Cabaret Voltaire, Kirk went on to record a zillion solo records under different names. This is trippy and ambient not for casual listening or the dance floor.
This is an early solo effort from Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk. It came in a three-pack CD set with a Malinder’s Pow Wow Plus and Cabaret Voltaire’s 1974-76. This record is in the brutal early style of Cabaret Voltaire and borders on pure noise at times. The focus here is electronic manipulation and less on beats and music.
This was the last band my brother was in before he left college. Great walls of guitar sound mixed with quiet parts. I am playing a little theremin on one of the tracks. I guess nowadays this might be called emo music, but this was a bit before all that. My brother went on to be a defense attorney, Patrick still plays in bands up in Madison, and Nathan was a founding member of the Chicago band Chinup Chinup. I don’t know what happened to the bassist. They have a MySpace page still!
More studio knob-twisting and ambient rethinkings of “Change” and “Requiem.”
Youth returned to the band prior to Pandemonium with these dancy remixes of “Change” and “Requiem.” Nothing too exciting here but pleasant nonetheless.