692. Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart - Rising Above Bedlam (1991)

Track Listing

1. Visions of You
2. Relight the Flame
3. Bomba
4. Ungodly Kingdom
5. Rising Above Bedlam
6. Erzulie
7. Everyman's an Island
8. Soledad
9. Sweet Divinity
10. Wonderful World


Review

I'm off on holiday until the 25th! So it is a good time to look through the archives and see if there is something you missed  :P Think of it like one of those cheap clip-episodes on some crappy sitcom.

This is one of those albums whose influence is clearly wide-ranging while not being particularly interesting or good in and of itself. The whole mix of modern rock and world music is not completely new, Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon had explored the Sub-Saharan African side of it already. Peter Gabriel had actually recorded music for Scorsese's Last Passion of the Christ in 1990 which explores Palestinian sounds, and is actually a better album than this one, but it is more of an ambient album than anything else.

Jah Wobble takes on a more Spanish, Arabic and North African kind of music while mixing it with non-world content. The main asset he has here is the great Natacha Atlas, who would eventually have a pretty successful solo career as a singer.

This is a style that would eventually influence people like Jean Michel Jarre, Sting and Peter Murphy of Bauhaus as well as more world-music types such as Lhasa de Sela. So yes the style is a very influential one, but it is not completely successful. A lot of the music sounds incredibly dated, a bit tacky and slightly bad. It's a pity.

Track Highlights

1. Soledad
2. Everyman's An Island
3. Sweet Divinity
4. Vision of You

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Following on from the success of several critical and popular landmark recordings, most notably "Without Judgement" and "Rising above Bedlam", in the late 80's and early 90s, respectively, Wobble has since collaborated with a wide variety of musicians. His explorations into World music predated much of the genre's popularity. Jah Wobble's 1994 album Take Me To God was influenced by world music genres and enriched by contributions from a variety of artists of diverse cultural backgrounds, including Baaba Maal, Dolores O'Riordan, and Chaka Demus, and its uplifting sounds made it both a critical and commercial success. His music has spanned a number of genres, including ambient music and dance music, and in 2003, reworkings of traditional English folk songs. Though he has released recordings since the early 1980s, Wobble has been quite prolific from the mid-1990s to the present. He now runs his own label, 30 Hertz Records, and tours regularly throughout England and Europe with his current band, Jah Wobble & The English Roots Band.

Visions of You:

691. MC Solaar - Qui Seme le Vent Recolte le Tempo (1991)

Track Listing

1. Intro
2. Qui Seme Le Vent Recolte Le Tempo
3. Matiere Grasse Contre Matiere Grise
4. Victime De La Mode
5. L'Histoire De L'Art
6. Armand Est Mort
7. Quartier Nord
8. Interlude
9. A Temps Partiel
10. Caroline
11. La Musique Adoucit Les Moeurs
12. Bouge De La
13. Bouge De La (2)
14. Ragga Jam
15. La Devise
16. Funky Dreamer

Review

French hip-hop really hasn't got the best of reputations today, the reasons are varied. Firstly the language is almost never as aggressive as English and therefore is not as suited to Public Enemy/N.W.A. style angry rap. Secondly a lot of the Francophone hip-hop sounds similar in its more laid back rhythms and so forth.

MC Solaar is very much a part of the tradition of French hip-hop but he is also the most original of those artists. MC Solaar is creating a template, and as is usual no one ever beat the sheer quality of this template for French hip-hop.

The production work is superb, the use of samples ditto, the lyrics are little more than bragging, but the music is so good that you manage to overlook that. All in all a very different hip-hop album that would spawn a thousand imitators that never were this good.

Track Highlights

1. Qui Seme le Vent Recolte le Tempo
2. Victime de la Mode
3. Caroline
4. Bouge de La

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The title is a pun on the French proverb "qui sème le vent récolte la tempête" (he who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind). It was released in 1991 and gained enormous success.
Bouge de là was the album's first single, which was hugely successful in France and went on to kickstart Solaar's career there. The song is based on a sample of The Message by 1970s English band Cymande.
Other popular singles from the album are Caroline and Victime de la mode.

Victime de la Mode:

690. Gang Starr - Step In The Arena (1991)

Track Listing

1. Name Tag (Premier And The Guru)
2. Step In The Arena
3. Form Of Intellect
4. Execution Of A Chump No More Mr Nice Guy
5. Who's Gonna Take The Weight
6. Beyond Comprehension
7. Check The Technique
8. Lovesick
9. Here Today Gone Tomorrow
10. Game Plan
11. Take A Rest
12. What You Want This Time
13. Street Ministry
14. Just To Get A Rep
15. Say Your Prayers
16. As I Read My S A
17. Precisely The Right Rhymes
18. Meaning Of The Name

Review

Humm, this is a strange hip-hop album, I don't dislike it in any particular way, there are plenty of things I like, but in the end it didn't make that strong of an impression.

That is probably a result of one of the good points of the album, it is quite quiet. There is none of the boisterous nature of Public Enemy or the sense of fun of De La Soul or Tribe, it just goes along, admitedly using very good samples, mostly taken from Jazz.

So yeah, it is perfectly good, I wouldn't mind listening to it again in the future, but I don't know that I would ever go out of my way to put this on for me to listen to.

Track Highlights

1. Form Of Intellect
2. Beyond Comprehension
3. Step In The Arena
4. Just To Get a Rep

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Both members of Gang Starr have deep roots in the New York hip hop scene, despite hailing from Boston, Massachusetts (Guru) and Houston, Texas [Originally From New York] (DJ Premier), and have each worked with countless artists.
The Gang Starr Foundation was a loose collective comprised of various members that have worked closely with the group, through either Guru's now defunct Ill Kid label, DJ Premier's production work or the management company that Gang Starr was represented by, Empire Management. The founding member was Vikar.


Form Of Intellect:

689. Julian Cope - Peggy Suicide (1991)

Track Listing

1. Pristeen
2. Double Vegetation
3. East Easy Rider
4. Promised Land
5. Hanging Out And Hung Up On The Line
6. Safesurfer
7. If You Loved Me At All
8. Drive, She Said
9. Soldier Blue
10. You...
11. Not Raving But Drowning
12. Head
13. Leperskin
14. Beautiful Love
15. Western Front 1992 C.E.
16. Hung Up And Hanging Out To Dry
17. The American Lite
18. Las Vegas Basement

Review

This is an interesting album, if for nothing else for the simple variety of music that Julian Cope manages to produce here while still keeping his own distinctive style. He touches on so many genres that this could have gone badly wrong, but it didn't.

If you are expecting more Teardrop Explodes you will probably disappointed, but it is just as good, there are still some traces of the post-punk/goth thing particularly in Cope's vocals and delivery, but the music is a kaleidoscope of styles.

It is actually Cope's presence that consolidates the album into a coherent whole, it stops it from sounding like a good compilation and gives it the sense of albumness. It should definitely be heard and if you can only get one track make it Safesurfer.

Track Highlights

1. Safesurfer
2. Hanging Out And Hung Up On The Line
3. If You Loved Me At All
4. The American Lite

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Julian Cope is into big stones:

1998 saw the release of the widely-acclaimed bestseller The Modern Antiquarian, a large and comprehensive full-colour 448-page work detailing stone circles and other ancient monuments of prehistoric Britain, which sold out of its first edition of 20,000 in its first month of publication and was accompanied by a BBC Two documentary. The Times called the book: "A ripping good read ... it is deeply impressive ... ancient history: the new rock 'n' roll." The Independent called it: "A unique blend of information, observation, personal experience and opinion which is as unlike the normal run of archaeology books as you can imagine." The historian Ronald Hutton went further, calling the book: "the best popular guide to Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments for half a century." The Modern Antiquarian was followed in 2004 with an even larger 484-page study of similar monuments across Europe entitled The Megalithic European, the most extensive study of European megalithic sites to date.

Here's Part 1 of Julian Cope's documentary on Megalithic Britain:

688. Cypress Hill - Cypress Hill (1991)
















Track Listing

1. Pigs
2. How I Could Just Kill A Man
3. Hand On The Pump
4. Hole In The Head
5. Ultraviolet Dreams
6. Light Another
7. Phuncky Feel One
8. Break It Up
9. Real Estate
10. Stoned Is The Way Of The Walk
11. Psycobetabuckdown
12. Something For The Blunted
13. Latin Lingo
14. Funky Cypress Hill Shit
15. Tres Equis
16. Born To Get Busy

Review

Well this is quite a different West Coast hip-hop album. Firstly it's Latino hip-hop and that marks it as different by itself. The Latin influence is more visible in the vocals and lyrics than really in the music itself, which seems to be very influenced by East Coast acts like the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy.

At least those are good influences to have. Another element that marks this album as a quite different one is its focus on weed. Yes, it's basically about smoking weed and chilling, but it isn't that laid back. They don't forget social issues.

So, I liked it, not immensely but there are plenty of tracks here to enjoy, some of the sampling is quite smart and it is at least original. It is at a higher level than most other West Coast hip-hop at this time. So good for them.

Track Highlights

1. How I Could Just Kill A Man
2. Tres Equis
3. Psychobetabuckdown
4. Hole In the Head

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Steve Huey of Allmusic calls Cypress Hill's debut "a sonic blueprint that would become one of the most widely copied in hip-hop."

Rolling Stone calls it "an album that is innovative and engaging in spite of its hard-core messages."

In 1998, the album was selected as one of The Source Magazine's 100 Best Rap Albums.

How I Could Just Kill A Man: