Various Familiar – Sunset Ambient Moods Sunset (Germany)

Well, the cover art is either crap or brilliant (can’t work out which) and while there’s some nice moments, there’s a lot of unlistenable ones as well. Oh, and half the CD isn’t ambient at all but MTV-friendly summer house. Amphasis’ Here Comes The Rain is nice, the production’s deep and not too glossy, a nice underbelly feel. Aaron’s Early Morning Dub is plain weird, a low-bitrate MP3 sample of an old tune I know of by the Grateful Dead but doubtless older, with a few dubby bits underneath. Digistar frat S Kinder’s Together is nice, it’s fat lazy jazz with a nice fluid guitar through it, a vibraphone picking up the end, and some nice skippy beats. Alegria’s Rainbringer is dross, Jacques Gelee’s Angels Sing is alright, but Matthew Boone’s Magie Der Sehnsucht is plain awful. A stupid melody, wet strings, looped wimpy vocals and a very introspective and over-emotional vibe. May have its moments if you’ve overdone it on the chemicals for about sixteen years, but otherwise you’ll be shouting at it to pull itself together, get out of the house, and find a girlfriend. Meanwhile, the dull-ass Love is Dangerous from Lorenzo manages to make a dull mockery of house and dub, and Yosshino’s Girl Machine is a skippy summer house beat, pads playing first one note then the other then that first one again, and going nowhere. It feels like being in the back of a car constantly asking “are we there yet?”. Planet Noire’s Relax and Frankman's Unterzucker are two competent slices of MTV summer house, and Lorenzo’s Who Wonders closes the album with another dullard, milky breakbeat introspective number which disappears up its own arse just in time for you to frisbee the CD out your window and throw the packaging in the bin. This is the side of the chillout scene that seems to assume that its audience needs to be ‘educated’ with an ‘eclectic’ blend of ‘beats,’ but compare this to the less-pretentious and less ‘look at me I’m cool’ CD’s out there and it doesn’t stand a chance. Forgive me for being so blunt, but this album needs to fuck right off.

More info: www.chaishop.com/sunset