RAW
Various Artists
It is 1957. Miles Davis releases Birth Of The Cool. Nobody has ever heard anything like it, and nobody is ever going to hear anything like it again. The world is changed. Ground Breaking Music.
It is 1961. Brian Epstein gets introduced to some band called The Beatles. Much fannying about later women are going crazy, pop is born. The world is changed again. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band becomes first psychedelic concept album. Ground Breaking Music.
Bob Dylan plays an electric guitar for the first time. The audience hate it. Dylan goes on to record and tour for another forty-plus years. It may not be Ground Breaking Music, but it’s definitely a Ground Breaking Moment In Music.
Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica is released. The boundaries of music are pushed, even violated, and critics are dumbfounded. Ground Breaking Music.
Leap forward to 1979. The Sugarhill Gang start rhyming over the top of a loop of Chic’s Good Times. They cannot stop rhyming until fifteen minutes has past. The world hears hip hop for the first time. Ground Breaking Music.
- Kurt Cobain meets Krist Novoselic and form Nirvana. I never really thought they were all that to be honest, but they seem to have influenced a lot of other bands, so in a sense they’re Ground Breaking Music.
There are countless other examples of Ground Breaking Music, but this album isn’t one of them. The name of the label is an insult to Ground, to Breaking and, perhaps most predictably, to Music as well.
What we have is essentially the scummy film from the edges of Chemical Crew’s toilet, Exaile / Tube / Psychotic Micro and all that. Young lads who are probably in all reality about as hard as a damp Weetabix pretending they have something to be angry about.
It’s so desperately, desperately unconvincing. Bliss leaves his namby-pamby stopstart action and becomes hard-bastard stopstart, like Eskimo’s post-nosebag-weekend comedown argument with a traffic warden. Tube’s Star Wars is totally without taste, decency, or merit. Psychotic Micro still needs a cheesy rave breakdown – about as punk as My Little Pony.
Dreadful. Was anyone suspecting otherwise?
Source: http://psyreviews.net/2007/06/various-raw-ground-breaking-music/
