Customer Reviews

Half Machine Lip Moves

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An excellent twofer containing the second and third Chrome albums from '78/'79, this is an essential purchase for anyone craving more experimental rock stylings. Originally formed prior to the punk boom of '76, the San Fran duo of Helios Creed and Damon Edge really found their feet with these two classics, and unfortunately never hit the same peak in their subsequent careers (though late '80s/early '90s Creed recordings are well worth checking out). Featuring a mix of sci-fi rhetoric/paranoia, screeching, primitive electronics, recorded-in-a-basement noodlings, and touches of krautrock (can, faust, neu, amon duul 1, etc.), hendrix and the stooges, this collection of songs work brilliantly on two levels: as an example of pure, indiluted experimentalism brimming with ideas; and as some of the best "rock" songs - riffs 'n' all - ever written. Got this reissue when it first came out in 1990 and STILL play the thing more often than I'd care to admit. Fans of krautrock, Residents, Nurse With Wound take note...

This is the only chrome album you need. this is very unfortunate, because it's such a good album, you're gonna be tempted to try to buy another chrome record, you'll think "i know what that guy said, but come on the other albums have to be worth something..."no they don't. This is a great example of a band reaching a very early pinnacle and plummeting from it into the abyss of crappy heavy metal ripoffs. About the album itself, sure kraut rock does this same stuff a few years earlier, but come on...isn't fist full of dollars the same plot as yojimbo? the fact that they are compared to faust and amon dull shows how few people where doing this amount of psychedelic mindmessing back then. this album rocks your socks off and dissects your brain. ignore the bozo who complains about the crappy drumset. if you're looking at this you like punk rock/kraut rock (something out of the ordinary), whatever. leave the people with the 4000 dollar instruments at the music store, let them have there 5.1 audio bs, you could play this on a one speaker fried casio boombox and it would still sound good.

HERE GENIUS !! INCREDIBLE MUSIC IN THE UNIVERSE...FOR LONG TIME

When I got this CD, it never left my cd player. Some of the songs start out with a bunch of noise, but then they really start rockin'. The singing on Abstract Nympo is so haunting I almost wet my pants when I first heard it. SS Cygni is another really good song. I no longer listen to any other music, because of this wonderous CD. Thank you Chrome, you guys are great.

Play tracks four through eight sufficiently loud while sitting in the middle of the stereo field and you'll get the picture. Yes, indeed, crappy drum sounds, but that's part of the appeal, in total contravention to present "standard practice". Not a bit of cleanliness and order here. That Damon Edge couldn't sing did not stop the bunch of them from recording one of the most singular meldings of acid-damaged psychedelia and dissonant electronics/tape weirdness available for your listening pleasure. Utterly primitive and demented, they threw in at least two kitchen sinks in the making and doubtless killed a lot of brain cells (maybe that's why their other stuff is so spotty?). That said, smack in the middle of second release included on this disk is "Nova Feedback", probably one of the "prettiest" pieces they ever did and one which is most firmly "music" by any measure.

Really a classic from a band deserving wider recognition. They didn't seem to find widespread fame because they didn't fit into any category, to heavy for punk, to intelligent for metal. Driven by Damon Edge's dark romanticism and spatial mixing and completed by Helios Creeds creative abstract guitars, these guys pleased many adventurous ears. Don't believe that this is a one shot deal either. There are quite a few records out there some very good some not so good.

Edit:

I like what Frank says: "At the time, absolutely nothing sounded like it and the globally scattered 200 (maybe) who understood what they were hearing recognized what a rupture it was."

Frank got it right. Very forward looking rapture. There are other recordings worth owning. I have 3 Damon Edge LPs that are very nice. Helios is an acquired taste. One of the great feedback rock guitars.

Listening to this makes me think of Mad Max -- stay with me on this one -- both are low-budget, crudely produced, somewhat dated, but still compelling visions of the future from the late '70's. Believe the other reviews as to how good this is -- this is not just amazing music, but seminal, and way ahead of its time, boldly kicking real rock music into the space/computer age. Granted, there had been earlier future-shock groups (especially in the Kraut-rock movement), but Chrome was the first to really ROCK. But let me emphasize, this is seriously crude. It sounds like the drummer, Damon Edge, was playing on a pawn shop drum kit that hadn't had its heads changed since the 60's, and the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in a basement, which I suppose it was. But then, maybe that crude D.I.Y. cyber-punk quality has a subversive charm. Come to think of it, this would have made good soundtrack music for Mad Max.

I first heard Chrome's Half Machine Lip Moves about a year after it was released on vinyl by Siren Records -- an unrelenting, adrenalized barrage of postapocalyptic, lo-tech, brazen hard rock showcasing the blazing guitar of Helios Creed and the electronically mutated vocals of the late Damon Edge backed up by a muscular rhythm section, jarring found sounds and editing, and a sci-fi narrative that makes Philip K. Dick read like Dr. Seuss.

More than a quarter century after its release, HMLM -- available in a sonically superb CD transfer on the Touch and Go label -- takes its place among the most prescient and original concept albums in recording history -- a cyberpunk, anti-Dark-Side-of-the-Moon.

TIP: For those of you with home theater systems and a Dolby Surround output setting, give it a listen in surround for maximum neuropsychedelic effect (it "decodes" amazingly well...).

After the irritating pestilence of 'The Visitation', Chrome should have disappeared into little more than a record collector's footnote for those bitchin' hand stencilled covers. Instead, they found Helios Creed fighting over the same pile of discarded electronic garbage in the Tenderloin. Using every quarter they could bum from in front of the Mitchell Brothers theatre to power a slick and polished visual campaign based on Xerox copiers, they proceeded to record these jaw-dropping aural spectacles. Lacking fans, a public stage, academic credentials or any strategic engagement with the music business, the band transmogrified from the gypsy moth which eats a leaf or two into a city raping Mothra. At the time, absolutely nothing sounded like it and the globally scattered 200 (maybe) who understood what they were hearing recognized what a rupture it was. While strictly adhering to the accepted conventions of rock, the guitar-solo on 'Nova Feedback' can make you weep, there is zero sense that the sound was connected to, came from or was going towards another musical dialectic. It would be years before people comprehended the music and sufficient resources were devoted to even understanding who the characters were. Unfortunately, time has been cruel to the source recordings and all reproductions have suffered noticeable and differing degradations in sonic quality. Purchase of the vinyl originals, themselves poorly made, is required. Critical to understanding music recorded after 1985.

This album is directly responsible for all the so called "alternative" rock. Chrome here gives birth to acts such as Skinny Puppy and NIN. You should expect a raw garage sound mixed with crazed effects laden vocals; like the Stooges cross bred with the Residents. The heavy SciFi element gives the album an additional psychodelic rush. If you pride yourself on knowing where all this "industrial, noise, cyberpunk" sound originated, then get this album at all costs. Add it to your perfect collection of modern rock. Thanks Amazon!