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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
a GREAT record, but DON'T buy it from this label,
By
This review is from: Escape From Noise (Audio CD)
Escape From Noise is one of Negativland's best. But...please, please...buy the CD from the band's own Seeland label. There's another link on amazon; you can easily jump over to it.
When Negativland got into legal trouble over their hilarious U2 parody, they got screwed not only by Island Records (who ridiculously claimed that the obscure release would confuse U2 fans and deprive the mega-wealthy band of sales), and not only Casey Kasem (who would hardly seem to have a right to censor his own words). No, they also got screwed by SST Records, their OWN LABEL. That's SST, the indie label with a lot of cred based on their having released the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and a lot of other great music. Although--rumor has it--they didn't do a good job of getting around to actually paying these artists (despite the tremendous sales said bands were generating, so much so that SST releases have often been unavailable due to the label not producing enough copies to keep up with demand). But where SST could have stood behind Negativland when Island came after them, instead they did everything they could to screw over their own band -- primarily by making them pay legal fees from every recording they'd ever made, forever. So if you buy Escape From Noise from SST, you're giving money to people with a "cool" aura they don't deserve, who've acted almost as greedy as the major label which succeeded--for many years, though not permanently--in preventing fans from hearing Negativland's U2 parody. If you buy the Seeland release, then the money goes to Negativland. Who need it, and deserve it. (Standard disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. This account is true merely to the best of my understanding, and may not be 100% true in every detail. Hey, I don't want Island or SST coming after ME, either.)
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Pranksters!,
By
This review is from: Escape from Noise (Audio CD)
You may or may not laugh at a man with a bullhorn, advising you that ¡§Communism Is Good! Communism is good!¡¨. I laughed pretty hard. The jokes here are subtle and sort of accidental, relying on surprising edits and strange juxtapositionings. Negativland takes found sound and splices it together. The result is not exactly pure bliss. I would say this album is, by turns, tedious, surprising, amusing, confusing, senseless, coherent, and clever. A child sings Somewhere Over The Rainbow but with the hiccups. A punk folksinger plays a song with a one word, charmless chorus ¡§CARBOMB!¡¨ screamed at the top of his lungs. A cold-war era segment of a call in radio show gets paranoid about Russia, pointing out that it has 13 time zones. A very slick voice over introduces a song which has been perfectly engineered to be a hit, pre-formulated for instant success across a wide range of demographics (and what a song it is!). There's a commercial for a beautiful suburb you can move to that's full of sycamores and...handguns. I wish I could know where the sounds come from. They record random broadcasts from CB, AM and short wave for starters but there are also home recordings from what seem to be strangers. Do they buy these at garage sales? Who knows, maybe someone you know is on this album! Their cut and paste effect reminds me of a friend who sometimes takes letters I send her and composes a reply entirely from the phrases of my own letter. Back comes my own letter, recognizable in parts, but totally put through a blender. Why do this? Why create a work of art that's just a mangling of someone elses words? Because the result is a surprising and strange poem, occasionally clever and beautiful, but often even better, meaningless and beautiful. This is not a music album, though it does contain some music. It is a sound collage that bears repeated listening. Recommended if you like the Firesign Theater radio drama LPs.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
rock music blares! doors slam! people yell!,
By
This review is from: Escape From Noise (Audio CD)
"The first cut on this record has been cross-format focussed for airplay success. As you well know, a record must break on radio in order to actually provide a living for the artists involved. Up until now, you've had to make these record-breaking decisions on your own, relying only on perplexing intangiblities like taste and intuition. But now there's a better way."This is the announcement that starts the record. Obviously there's so many things wrong about this announement that I don't want to point them all out. Negativland have made it this far, despite their complete disregard for radio. Escape From Noise is the culmination of their achievements. While their earlier records didn't really have any coherence to them, this one has a theme, more or less, although the actual sound is a boiling pot for more diverse scattered samples ever. Noise. It's everywhere, in different shapes and forms. It's in the media bombardment we face daily, it's the jackhammers outside your window, and it's the sheer number of people around you. Negativland even brings it down to a microscopic scale, with the noise of marital arguments, your cable gone out and even a simple anomaly like the hiccups. A loud echoing voice in "Michael Jackson" announces with an air of authority "The Cars. Herbie Hancock. Bonnie Tyler. ZZ Top. Weird Al Yankovic. Cindi Looper." Only at the end do we find that it's a sample of a Christian rights guy calling for the destruction of rock music. "Escape From Noise" is a funky disjointed song with the Weatherman screaming, and it's quite catchy despite its unpredictable pace. "The Playboy Channel" at first seems to be just a funny little song about a man getting his orgasm wrecked by his cable going out. Listen to it enough times and you start to realize how true it is, how much we rely on cable, the man's orgasm just being a metaphor. It's disturbing how many time the Weatherman says "That sound is more important than your entire life. And it will stop you from having an orgasm on the Playboy Channel." The first six songs are a barrage on your ears and after that we get into calmer fare like "Nesbitt's Lime Soda," an ode to the bottle of soda that was ruined by a fly. "Car Bomb" starts up the psychosis again. The incredibly antsy "Methods of Torture" tells how noise used to be used as a method of torture. "Time Zones" is about 4 minutes of a conversation from a radio call in show being constantly mixed up. They're talking about how terrifying it is that there are 11 time zones in the Soviet Union compared to the United States' measly 4 time zones. This album could really use a song like "Aluminum or Glass" from Dispepsi to anchor everything down, but Escape from Noise still holds up well.
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