Customer Reviews

Blow

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

 

 

This is a CD with remixes from the songs found on the Flow album. The Flow album was an excellent adventurous album, whereas this one is boring from beginning until the end. All the songs found on the album Flow have been rearranged, their raw inspiration has been stripped away, and an insepid beat kills the music off. I think it was a big mistake for Jim to have his music being sliced by others devoid of any imagination. This CD is just a dance club version of Flow, very, very disappointing.

Hence the title of my review, let this cup pass you by, get Flow instead.

All but one of the remixes on this cd are by people other than Jim Thirlwell, but I think he directed it all. The music is so different from the originals versions on Flow. Thirlwell must love how different the music is. Flow is very emotional, big sounds, & this weird music is sort of dance & sort of ambient & totally different. Mr Thirlwell just wanted a wide wide variance in musical styles between Flow & Blow. I can't give it more than 4 stars because the music hasn't really spoken to me enough, some of the remixes other people do really feel uninspired.

Foetus has never abandoned his trademark of unpredictable growth & rapid change, & the difference between Blow & Flow is extreme. With Flow, at first it seemed like Jim might have narrowed his ideas of what Foetus could be, but now it seems more like part of the reason Flow sounds how it does is so he could then react to it with something like Blow.
It's not a loud & noisy cd. Its focus is very much bare, repetitive minimalism, like what might have hapened if Mozart were Philip Glass who was a paranoid schizophrenic during the Holocaust.
He's taken the focus off the guitars & percussion & redirected it onto fie-tuned electronics. Another thing -- the muted mixing people complained about with Flow wa no mistake; Foetus loves that muteness, that slightly stifled passion. The music here is very mute, almost dark eerie dance club music or maybe stark ambience, with a few of Foetus's well-loved jazzy surprises.
Of course Jim didn' do most of the remixes & music on this cd, but he directed them, & it is a Foetus-conceived [pun not intended] sound. A few tracks that were disappointing to me were the Mandelay remix by Phylr & the Grace of God remix by Kidney Thieves & Sean Beavan. My beef with Mandelay might have been that I had been looking forward to more of the original song, which Foetus would NOT deliver.
There's always so much more in him than his releases show us specifically, & what better way to say that than how Flow starts, with the obnoxious noise of Quick Fix followed by the bachelor pad groove of Cirrhosis of the Heart & then the pounding, dense, cathartic repetition of Mandelay? THEN tofollow that up by turning them all into something completely different with Blow...thanks, Foetus, for keeping everyone guessing forever.

Foetus has never abandoned his trademark of unpredictable growth & rapid change, & the difference between Blow & Flow is extreme. With Flow, at first it seemed like Jim might have narrowed his ideas of what Foetus could be, but now it seems more like part of the reason Flow sounds how it does is so he could then react to it with something like Blow.
It's not a loud & noisy cd. Its focus is very much bare, repetitive minimalism, like what might have hapened if Mozart were Philip Glass who was a paranoid schizophrenic during the Holocaust.
He's taken the focus off the guitars & percussion & redirected it onto fie-tuned electronics. Another thing -- the muted mixing people complained about with Flow wa no mistake; Foetus loves that muteness, that slightly stifled passion. The music here is very mute, almost dark eerie dance club music or maybe stark ambience, with a few of Foetus's well-loved jazzy surprises.
Of course Jim didn' do most of the remixes & music on this cd, but he directed them, & it is a Foetus-conceived [pun not intended] sound. A few tracks that were disappointing to me were the Mandelay remix by Phylr & the Grace of God remix by Kidney Thieves & Sean Beavan. My beef with Mandelay might have been that I had been looking forward to more of the original song, which Foetus would NOT deliver.
There's always so much more in him than his releases show us specifically, & what better way to say that than how Flow starts, with the obnoxious noise of Quick Fix followed by the bachelor pad groove of Cirrhosis of the Heart & then the pounding, dense, cathartic repetition of Mandelay? THEN tofollow that up by turning them all into something completely different with Blow...thanks, Foetus, for keeping everyone guessing forever.

if you haven't read my first review of Blow, then read it now, before you contiue with this one.

Anyway...it's not nearly dance music or ambience...but it's...well, it's Foetus, & it's not for the light of heart!