Always Never Again

Supersystem | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 12, 2005)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Touch & Go Records
• ASIN: B0007X9UUG
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #412,127 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Catchy / Complex, April 15, 2005

By 

Ryan Nee "who has nothing clever to put in th... (Denver) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Always Never Again (Audio CD)

Many dance records don't have the complexity that keeps you listening after a long time. This one is most certainly different. It starts out with a bang in Born Into The World and keeps going strong through the end. The relatively simple beats mix well with intricate guitar lines and overlapping vocals to create a really great stripped-down sound. You could seriously put this thing on from start to finish and have one hell of a dance party. If you like dance-punk, this record is a great addition to your collection. Be sure to check out the old El Guapo records too, they are equally great. Too bad they had to change their name, El Guapo is the best name ever.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great, Well Composed Dance Music, July 11, 2005

By 

E. Sherman (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Always Never Again (Audio CD)

I'm worried the poor reviews for this album are because the reviewers didn't know what they were getting into. This is a great album with nice, fast, well structured beats that will take a long time before they get old. You can't say half as much about all the generic dance music that's floating around out there.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars stop reading and dance already, May 8, 2005

By 

Sinlechuga (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Always Never Again (Audio CD)

A lazy reviewer might dismiss the album as a mixed bag of disparate styles and inane lyrics (see phoned-in Pitchfork review). But "Always Never Again" is more cohesive and unabashedly catchy than El Guapo (Supersystem's previous incarnation) ever was, as if their penchant for experimenting has matured into something less obvious and more refined, though no less complicated. For example, "Defcon" is a pretty straightforward dance track, but its Armageddon rallying cry and horrifying singsongs ("When Defcon goes from one to five / Everybody's got to run and hide / From the city to the countryside / We go to NORAD to survive") make it an uncanny anthem for post-9/11 cold war nostalgia. It's a sincere/ironic engagement with 80s ethos, as opposed to just another empty appropriation of skinny ties and Q-Bert bleeps (see The Faint et al), and this kind of tonal play permeates the whole album. Take "Everybody Sings", a cheery ode to the ambivalence and disconnected intimacy people can feel toward the groups they're a part of, whether it's a music scene, an economic class, a nation, your friends, or the entire human species. That I've seen this song unify a crowd of dancing concertgoers makes my heart soar in several different directions at once. Or how Supersystem can be effortlessly literary, as in the song "Six Cities", composed of Calvino-esque mini-parables about cities made of steel, wood, plastic, etc: "There was once a city that was made of glass / All the buildings you could see right through / Each and every person there had opinions and ideas / And each and every one of them was true." In "Click-Click", the lyrics engage the detached voyeurism of pornography and the internet: incorporating ironic terms like "big naturals" (to refer to digital boobs), the deadpan analysis of absent-presence compounds into a cry of desperation at the end of the song with the excessive repetition of "You saw them there / But they were somewhere else". And in "The Love Story", the fickle tide of human emotion is equated with seasonal affective disorder, both dependent upon and counting on the change in weather to save us. In all of these songs (and the rest of the album), the heart & intelligence of the lyrics grow out of the music: their bio on Touch and Go describes their sound as a "unique fusion of Ethiopiques worldbeat, post-Kraftwerk synth pop, and brash Pixies attitude," and I'm not going to dispute their marketing claims. I love this album. If I had any cash money I'd walk into a record store and lay my bills on the counter, but as it is I'll just charge it to my credit card like everything else.