Customer Reviews

Hicksville

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Celtic Cross: Simon Posford, Youth, and Soul Davies have outdone themselves with this release. By taking electronica and mixing it (successfully) with acoustic instruments ranging from the violin, to the guitar, oud, flute and various percussion instruments they've created a kind of world-beat techno-acoustica. Much of the music has a definite celtic flavor such as the violin driven techno of Darshanon. Well Ireland meets Algeria anyway, but other musical influences are also in the mix. There's a bit of Jamaican dub, eastern singing, acoustic guitar, flute etc., all integrated with psychedelic electronica. It's eclectic all right. On Hicksville, Celtic Cross weaves a dense rhythmic tapestry from disparate sources and takes you for an exotic flying carpet ride. I love the William Burroughs quote from which the first song Hicksville gets it's title: "My god, are we EVER in Hicksville."

Came across this CD by chance a few weeks ago and it hasn't left the stack of CD's I listen to every day since.
It's a blend of celtic sounds and trance/ambience music of finest quality, without the flaws many past experiments by other bands presented (like for example the mixes of gregorian chants and ambient that wandered too much into pop and were too commercial).
My favourite tracks: no.4 - Shwazz and, above all, no. 6 - Khatmandu, one of my favourite trance tracks ever, with its world beats, only too short: you are brought back from your imaginary journey too soon. In general however it's a difficult choice, the best thing is to listen to all the CD and flow with the music.
Overall, this CD is a masterpiece and a must have for every trance music fan. I look forward to further releases by Celtic Cross.

The mix of celtic violin and techno beats are so well blended, this album takes you on a journey to the imaginary. First and last songs are, to my humble opinion, the most extraordinary. Really worth the buy. I strongly recommend it.

For those of you who don't know this... Simon Posford (also of hallucinogen/shpongle/younger brother) is also one of the members behind celtic cross. Others covered the sound pretty well, so all I can say in addition is if you like Goa or Psytrance and you think you might like to hear it mixed with celtic melodies than give it a shot because this album is produced really well.

It's hard to describe how well this CD is put together. The soundscapes and the mixes of influences from cultures is appearant. It's psychadelic ambient music at it's best.

Simply put, this is the best "Trance" album I have ever heard.

I have listened to a lot of ambient/trance material but this just awed me in its originality and muscianship.

Mixing ambient/trance with violins, acoustic guitars, Celtic sounds, various percussions, flutes, etc., makes for an incredible listening experience. I can only hope the band can produce more of this kind of sound.

I love this album, especially the first and last numbers. You have to get this through an MP 3 players because it's not offered on regular CD, to my knowledge.

1. Hicksville - 7:35
Written-By - M. Coldrick*
2. Stargate Avalon - 1:32
3. Jade Garden - 7:38
4. Shwazz - 8:59
5. Fifth Level - 4:36
6. Khatmandu - 7:43
7. Mundis Imaginalus - 7:50
8. Louden - 3:22
9. Darshannon - 6:10
Written-By - Chester (2)

The music is wonderful. A friend introduced me to it and I wanted to buy the album for myself. I did so and it turns out the MP3s are encoded wrong. The songs are several seconds longer than the encoded song length so what should be a seamless album has weird no-sound spaces between the tracks and you can't easily fix this in itunes by just setting the play length of the track. Really ruins enjoyment of the album. :(

So. 5 stars for the music, -5 for the download.

As the other reviews state, this album is amazing. The only problem I have with buying this from Amazon is that after each song, an extra 2-4 seconds was added which are completely blank. The result is that, even though this album was obviously meant to flow from one song to the next, there is a gap between songs so I had to manually open each song in an audio editor and remove the offending segments. Another issue is that the fourth song "Shwazz" is incorrectly labeled as "Shnazz" which required more editing to fix. 5 stars for the album, 2 stars for Amazon.