Word: mellotrons
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...like pop softness, and "There Was a Time" has him scampering flawlessly up the vocal ladder from low growls to meticulous high notes. Most of the tracks clock in at about five minutes, with solid melodies and abundant pace and instrument changes. Choirs show up sometimes, as do a mellotron and a Spanish guitar. It's almost enough to keep things interesting. Almost...
...course, there are nine more songs on Icky Thump, and none of them are simple. There's an alien invasion-- style Mellotron solo on the title track and what one hopes is a humorous attempt to reintroduce the bagpipe as a legitimate rock instrument on Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn. These are Top 10 fare compared with the album-stopping Conquest, in which Jack, Meg and a band of mariachis exhume a Corky Robbins tune. It's funny. Once...
...enthralled to obsess about originality. And yet there is something unique about her trips to the past: Supernature shimmers along with an electric buzz like a dangerously overloaded socket, enlivening the edge between human voice and machine. "I think that's why we love old analog synthesizers - like the Mellotron, which tries to imitate a human sound, an acoustic sound that's a bit wrong somehow," says Goldfrapp. They even break their own rule and plug in a guitar for the first time on the Marc Bolan glam-rock stomp of Ooh La La and Satin Chic. Through all three...
...thrilling to trace, on Anthology 2, the gestation of Strawberry Fields Forever--from John's first rough tape, just voice and guitar (frustrated, he keens, "I canna' do it, I canna' do it"), to a spare, beautifully sung take with Paul's mellotron and George's gently weeping guitar, to the slow, sliding version that (when speeded up by Martin) provided the first minute of the final single. All these takes are gorgeous but tantalizing. Let's hear the whole amazing production process--an all--Strawberry Fields...
...oddball instrumentation--live, and on their previous records, Rob Christiansen some-times plays bass, and sometimes instead plays trombone. But that's nothing compared to the "Day in the Life" style piling up of styles and timbres on this album: a smoothly anachronistic analog synth (could it be a Mellotron?) pops up in several songs, and so effectively each time that by the end of the 66-minute Exploder opus you'll probably have moved from wondering how anyone could use a Mellotron sound on a rock record at all in 1994 to wondering why that sound doesn't crop...