Sigh... this is going to be a dance album, isn't it? I'm guessing that based on the year the album was released, the really neat cover art, which dance albums are known for 'round these parts, and the album being 70 minutes long and only 11 songs. Dance albums almost always work out to be obscenely long, because it's an easy trick for the "artist" to simply cut and paste and double the length of the "song". I'm used to being quickly outraged by these albums, usually in the first 10 seconds of pressing play. Here goes nothing...
OK, I was wrong about this being a pure dance album. The opening track "Release The Pressure [Album Version]" at least has some very clear lyrics on top of a video game worthy synth track. The lyrics are pretty scant and between the minimalist verses there is a lot of wasted space. Each movement of the song features a protracted build-up period before the heavy beat sets in, so the song winds up being nearly 8 minutes of build-up with no real payoff.
"Afro Left" is another lame synth dance track, but also mixes with the standard dance formula by including lyrics in... ugh... some African language. Please pardon my racist ignorance. In trying to review these albums completely cold sometimes shit like that just slips through. I wish I had a working knowledge of more languages so I could decipher... Oh shit, I looked it up and it turns out the vocalist (Neil Cole or "Djum Djum") was just saying African-based gibberish. So I still feel a bit racist, but if an artist is gonna throw random African words against the wall it's not so bad, because I wouldn't have been able to figure it out anyway. Right?
On "Song Of Life" I'm guessing the bass sound was created by plucking a really long rubber band at varying tensions. It doesn't really remind me much of my life. It does make me think of all those shitty new age bands like Effervescence or whoever wrote that "Return to Innocence" song. Is Leftism supposed to be meditation music you can dance to? Now that I think about it, this entire genre is supposed to be about taking Ecstasy and jumping around a dance floor bathed in colored lights. I think that's what Euro-trash techno (or as some call it, "house music") is really about. Lots of drugs, colorful lights, and music that just drones on and on for hours.
As long as New Forms exists this isn't the worst dance album I've ever heard in my life. But it's still a dance album, and therefore there's almost no chance I'll like it. The biggest problem I have is if you've heard one dance album I have no idea why you need to hear this one or any others before you die. Fail. 1 star.
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