June 2002 • Rockbites Alternative Daily
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June 2002 • Rockbites Alternative Daily
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UK’s Spaceheads release 7th album for US only, for now 7 June 2002
London/Manchester instrumental duo Spaceheads (Andy Diagram on loops, samples, and processed trumpet; Richard Harrison on drums and percussion) released their seventh album this week on their US label, Durham/Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s Merge Records. The disc is not yet available elsewhere in the world except as an import. The aptly named Low Pressure explores the dichotomy between dark & foggy dreamscapes and dazzling neon dance energy—often within the same song. This tension of opposites is the magneto that powers this album. Diagram and Harrison, shunning soundbite culture and its glorification of heavy-handed pseudo art, don’t sacrifice a note of their musical vision to the gods of accessible commercialism. Yeah, there are recognizable textures and melodic hooks here, but take a closer listen. Those elements are there to participate in layers of musical irony and beauty, dimensions of hope and strangeness, moments of tangible space. You’ll need to devote more than a bit of focus to appreciate Low Pressure, kind of like learning to read the face of your pet—you have to pay attention but once you do a whole familar yet alien vocabulary appears. The last three songs on the record are really one 23-minute piece, starting with the spooky/aggressive masterpiece Storm Force 8 with intense jungle beats layered with techno arpeggios, ethereally inhuman vocals, and nightmare machine screams. Red Shift reveals the calm after the cataclysm with gentle, heavily processed, multi-tracked trumpets evoking images of gray-blue clouds slowly teased apart by the wind to expose a black and starry sky—and then you’re looking at the world from the outside and it’s snowing stars all around you and then you are alone, or all one, in quiet void. The finale, Over The Moon, is reassuringly upbeat yet infused with the metallic taste of the freaky dream now past. Diagram and Harrison have played together for about twenty years, first in Manchester’s Dislocation Dance. They started Spaceheads in 1989, and are known around the world for their wild and awe-inspiring live shows. Andy also plays with Pere Ubu’s David Thomas in David Thomas And The Two Pale Boys, and has played with James. Richard also plays with NYC band God Is My Co-Pilot. The new Spaceheads LP shows them still bursting out all over with creative flowers. Four bites out of five. Rockbites ratings 5: life changing, 4: stunning, 3: captivating, 2: amusing, 1: annoying. Spaceheads will tour the US east coast and midwest late this summer, and will return in January for some US west coast dates. Anyone who has seen them will tell you their live show is not to be missed. | Spaceheads | | Spaceheads on Merge | | CD from Amazon US | | top of page | |
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