Tokyo Tel Aviv Vol 2

Weird one this. Pretty much everyone seems to be aware of it, and I’m buggered if I know why. Crap cover, maybe? Daft name? I’m really not sure, nor do I really care. But what’s significant is that this particular turkey has been shifting units left right and centre. I can understand that to the Japanese market (where, let’s bear in mind, Tower Records et al have massive sections on psytrance with posters and cardboard cutouts and recommendations and, you know, like, everything) this will look tasty: Israeli artists doing an album “for the Japanese ravers” lol lol lol… I mean, fuck’s sake.

There is nothing on this that is remotely psychedelic, penned the reviewer before realising this statement is so recycled now it’s almost as defunct and useless as the music it usually describes. This is universally music for children, kids rebelling against their Emo peers by taking ecstasy and ditching the black in favour of dayglo fluoro shit and god knows what.

Actually no, scratch that: this is music for greased-up suave twats dressed in Diesel shirts pilling their faces off in the Sonica sunshine. Whatever it is, this music keeps getting further and further away from what the words “psychedelic” and “trance” used to combine to create.

And the real cosmic joke in all of this, is that if you don’t play this stuff at a party people get confused: “where’s the psytrance?” “IT DIED BEFORE YOU ARRIVED YOU FUCKING FUCKERS. FUCK.”

Freaked Frequency shows some moments of real class in Blastoff, with some decent twist action slammed over a hugely generic backbone. Bizzare Contact commits the latest vocoder crime, Double Impact’s Analog Illusion has an irritating stab every fourth fucking beat, Electro Sun needs excommunicating for “that fucking” melody, Gataka vs Ziki’s Tokyo Time is the only decent track among them (and that’s being generous), Illumination vs Ziki’s Who We Are is a waste of binary, Stereomatic’s Extreme nicks the best bits off what Chicane was doing years ago, and Ultravoice’s On The Move sounds like every other Ultravoice track I’ve heard, except with a gnarlier finale.

To cap it all the mastering – done by let’s-have-a-new-villian DJ Bog – has so many holes in it, it’s incredible. Levels drop and rise, most of it is in the red and you have to seriously work your mixer to get any of that crucial bottom-mid out.

Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I’m going to have some beans on toast.