Customer Reviews

Big Men Cry

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is trainmusic. It is also music hard to review since it hits the gaian, spiritual part of your mind more than your simple human intellect:-)...but I'll give it a try.
Banco De Gaia has always been onto something big, but somehow the music has been to mature to really excite. This is not the case with Big Men Cry. Still mature it also has the feeling of a sane child free to play. Hence this is the best album by the man. With tribal drums, exotic voices and live recordings of engines, mixed with alien electronic tweeked tones, fat base and also "silence", it has the capability to give you an out of the body experience towards the end of the album.

Toby Marks writes ecclectic electronic dance music; great. But what I came across on this CD were tracks 6 & 7. Polished well produced electronica space ambience. Not mysterious. Yet not new age....#6 "One billion miles out" tracks an elliptical heliopausal journey to the edge of our solar system. Kuiperian chants mix with intangable inner space communications to fill the dark void....#7 "Starship earth" is an intense (20 min) evolving oversized production. Somewhere out there filamentous infrared cirrus sounds support a base for various eclipsing binaries. Ghostly protogalactic hollow voices hold your attention while wonderfully balanced sound waves support the fabric of this space project.

Personally, I found this album to be my favorite from Banco de Gaia. More ambient and mellow than his other works, I feel that "Big Men Cry" contains much more depth than the other albums and expands onto more creative grounds. The songs "Celestine" and "Big Men Cry" are both masterpieces yet very different from each other. True, this is an album that is more for the mind than for the feet, but maybe Banco de Gaia wanted to create a more introspective and atmospheric album this time around.

This is a wonderful album by someone who knows the formula for deep IDM music. There is a lot of thought, emotion, and energy in this album and by the second or third listen this will really move you. The overall speed of this is more of a faster IDM (intelligent dance music) while containing a ton of thought in each one of the tracks. There are some vocals in the tracks and you can tell the vocalists have a trained singing career (unlike bulk of house singers).

The album is injected with some east Asian instruments which at times will make you think while at other times it will put a tear in your eye. Everything is so well thought out, you wont be able to help but to listen to this over and over. Introduce yourself to Banco and enjoy this fantastic album. A+

This album is thoughtful and complex. The tracks start out simply and innocently enough, slightly timid and shy, and before you know you it, you're drawn into a sonic landscape and not only unfolds infront of you, but pulls you into its vortex.

The music is enraging, engaging, emotional, and spiritual. This album has it all, and clearly one of my all time favorites.

I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.

In my opinion this is Banco's most mature album. Out of all that he has crafted Big Men Cry is a superlative experience. First half appears upbeat. Then it's through the looking glass.

The only reason I can see why the comparisons made to Pink Floyd is track 2. The presence of saxophone and the sound of the synth do indeed remind one of the Wish You Were Here `floyd. Yet there's so much more happening. Pink Floyd could only wish for such a beautiful piece. So in no way is it a negative that Banco's creating such a wonderful sound. Anyway as I say there's so much more. The title track - when I first heard it - sounds as if you'll sure someone else wrote it. It is a classic piece. Short, serene, sad and watery is how I can best describe it...an oriental water garden with strings. Very moving. Starstation Earth is a delicate piece which gives a brilliant ending. Subtle melody and an breathtaking synth solo before the beat arrives 5 minutes before the end.

Big Men Cry is a lot more `airy' then other works by Banco. Much bigger environments to lose yourself and yet introspective as well. Brilliantly recorded. To sum up I would heartily recommend this to anyone wanting to do an emotional travelin'

Toby Marks had released two earlier CDs under his alias Banco de Gaia, 1994's MAYA and 1995's LAST TRAIN TO LHASA, which featured a fun groove of trippy dance beats overlaid with ethnographic samples. To a degree, every Banco de Gaia follows the same formula, and if you've heard one, you've heard them all. Nonetheless, the 1997 effort BIG MEN CRY does feel like an evolution beyond previous Banco de Gaia sounds. For one, it's a lot more ambient.

The opening "Big Men Cry" is purely instrumental, poignant string sounds mixing with synthesizer. The following "Celestine" introduces the ethnic samples and a more apparent beat, but here we find a lazy saxophone drifting over the soundscape. These are sounds meant more for a home chillout environment than the dance floor. That's not to say there aren't great beats here. "Drippy" is based around sampled water drops and live drumming and quickly develops into polyrhythmic complexity.

"Drunk as a Monk" is the first really aggressive, dance-oriented track on the album, developing over an angry ostinato of what sounds like chant, relaxing for a bit, and then turning it back up with a variety of samples. "Gates Does Windows" is a one-minute interlude of birdsong and someone whistling a tune. "One Billion Miles Out" is a wash of synthesized strings over samples of early computer bleep-bloops and a barely audible conversation from a film, then transitions to live drumming and guitar. The final track here, "Starstation Earth", clocks in at an ambitious 20 minutes and for the most part sounds, if anything, more like '70s prog rock intros (think Rush's "Xanadu") than dance music. The last five minutes do bring in some beats and vocals.

Of the first four Banco albums, this is the first one that I can put on without ever cringing at Toby Marks' lack of conventional musical talent. His following album, THE MAGICAL SOUNDS OF BANCO DE GAIA, seems a major step backward.

After the excellent 'Last Train to Lhasa' and 'Maya', Banco da Gaya looses strength and breadth and at times comes across as pastiche Pink Floyd (which they themselves are more than capable of). Get his previous work but don't assume that this album will move you to the same degree.

Definively inferior to Banco de Gaia's previous work, this is nothing else than fake world music with some techno-electronic beats thrown in. It must be said that Drippy, the first track is a trully great opener, but the rest of the stuff is pure dissapointment.