Word: synth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sweaty, screaming throng asks, begs, demands more. A single silver crescent slices through the madness. It is the messianic figure of Thorndike Smith, back arched in orgiastic pleasure, lips curled, a portal to the monster sound that pours from his gilded throat. His synth-pop benediction sends a tidal wave of emotion through his already epileptic disciples. This is the phenomenon known as JENNR8R. In an unprecedented move, JENNR8R agreed to be interviewed, if only briefly, by Fifteen Minutes...
...willpower. Generally, the early songs on 81>85 are boring and odd: deadpan lyrics against bonky day-train melodies lead to wholesome industrial marches. Depeche Mode did have some moments in their youth-tinny drum hooks after the "People are People" chorus, a lot of pleasant moaning, pipey synth pushing throughout. By the second half of 81>85, DM starts timing its airy crescendoes very well and on tracks like "Blasphemous Rumours" and "Shake the Disease" you can feel the dark matter of the eighties, even if you can't dance to it. Depeche Mode is a band...
...prominent and experimental aspect of the album. The first song, "Rolling," opens with drummer Yuval Gabay pounding a quick, charged drum and bass beat, followed immediately by stand-up bassist Sebastian Steinberg's entrance with low bowed bass notes as keyboardist/sampler-man Mark Di Gli Antoni inserts an eerie, ambient synth line. Electronica is slowly creeping into their homemade style, creating an effective menagerie of beats. Gabay seamlessly incorporates jungle and drum and bass beats throughout the album under Doughty's sung funk-poetry. British drum and bass master Optical (who has mixed for, among others, Goldie, Metalheadz and Grooverider) mixed...
...constant tension Doughty and Co. create between the words and the music. "Pensacola," perhaps the most beautiful song on the album, is an excellent example of Soul Coughing's elegant alliance between sound and language. The song opens with an underwater, ambient effect of waves of bass and high synth strings. Doughty enters with a uncharacteristically melancholy and amazingly seductive voice to sing about suffocating love. As the line "like waves in which you drown me shouting, waves in which you drown me shouting" repeats almost endlessly, the waves of bass and Doughty's hypnotic voice meld into a virtually...
...thing that made them at all compelling in the first place: pop song structure. Without verse-cho-rus-verse (or, in some cases on YES!!, chorus-chorus-chorus), Knox is completely lost. The final 18-minute track is a masturbatory opus of noise, static and tape and synth-looped sound effects...