Customer Reviews

The Isness

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

As one of the reviewers below suggests, I'm starting to think that you really had to be alive in the 60s, and preferably highly sentient by 1972, to realize what an absolute masterpiece this is, with perhaps one qualification. The major one for me is that to truly appreciate FSOL one has to "conceptualize" each of their releases in terms of the initial album (i.e Dead Cities) and the subsequent "translations" that followed (i.e. My Kingdom in the case of DC's) and view them as an inseparable "whole." As such, when I think of FSOL's "Isness," I view it as a three disc set consisting of the original album, "The Mello Hippo Disco Show" and "The Otherness." Now, in light of the kind of music FSOL are making here, look both backwards (into your record collection) and sideways (at what other artists are doing presently). What compares to this? Sgt. Pepper's? Meddle? In the Court of the Crimson King? Larks Tongues in Aspic? Red? Close to the Edge? Go back and give them another listen, great as they are, and be prepared to be surprised. Radiohead? Daft Punk? The Orb? Only if you're the kind of nut who thinks that Joe Strummer was "really" a better guitarist than Jeff Beck still is.

FSOL have done something here very much like what DJ Shadow did on Entroducing, except they used their brains instead of a turntable. To my ears, this is the most intelligent, coherent, "collageist" summing up of everything that was wonderful about Progressive Rock (anybody who says "Prog" is showing their youth) and Psychedelia that one could wish for. A song by song breakdown would be tedious, and I'm not in any way slighting incredible stuff like "Dead Cities," which I consider to be their masterpiece. And one might add that if this album is missing anything, its some of the awesome rhythmic impact of their best work. But this is a masterpiece as well, and completely unlike anything else out there at present. If you ever wondered what your favorite progressive bands might have done had they not burned out (am I the only one who thinks The White Album is three sides too long or that Adrian Belew should be tried for Crimes Against Music?) pick up all three of FSOL's most recent releases and listen to them as if they were part of the same album. This is about as far as music can be taken when moved in the direction suggested by the best of the late 60s and 70s. I'm definitely not a sensitive, 90s kind of guy, but this album frequently brings tears to my eyes, its so incredibly, unexpectedly perfect. Nothing else outside of "classical" music and ultra-progressive jazz like Coltrane's "Ascension" or "Meditations" does that for me anymore. This falls into line with every other FSOL release in having more absolutely beautiful (not the same thing as "pretty") stuff on it than just about anything else released during the last 40 years. Comparing this band to such forgettable acts as Supertramp and ELO, as an editorialist did above, is like blasting Bach's Partita for solo violin in D-Minor for having no good tunes: sheer idiocy. As for me, I'll still be listening to this and loving it in the nursing home when young kids are using Radiohead CD's as drink coasters. And if you still have a proper stereo, owning and playing these three discs will make you glad you don't do most of your music listening at a computer terminal (that's about as depressing to think about as on-line gambling). Beautiful, magnificent, and yes, timeless stuff, and not to be missed, especially if you're old enough to remember when smoking was allowed in grocery stores.

I had to go back to my clasic prog rock albums of the 70's and do my homework after listening to this album. I even had to listen again to my krautrock collection for a while. And after I was done I sat down to listen again to "Isness".

What a great, modern, progressive rock album. What a great departure from what these guys have been doing in the past.
The experimentation is there, the concept album is short of there, the long tracks, all the ingredients are there.
And to make a long story short, I absolutely love this album. As I loved everything FSOL has released before. It is great music.

I have been missing the kind of albums that is evident that their creators have spent long hours in the studio, thinking, ruminating, living, getting inspired, absorbing the drama of life and struggling to put it all together in an album that at the end they are proud of. I am so sick of this cut and paste music that is all around us today. I am disgusted by this music and all the promos and the little untalented girls and boys repeating the same 5 notes again and again ,and the hype and all this media bull.

Thank God that groups like FSOL are out there still serving the thinking listener with great material, something that you have to listen again and again to get it all, like a difficult book , a difficult exercise, that after you solve it you end up with this feeling of self satisfaction and accomplishment.

Yes, you have to listen to this album a few times, it is a remarkable piece of composition, great diversity, very deep , with a great spectrum of different instruments that I wont even bother to list. Unbelievable music. MUSIC with capital M.

A must buy for all FSOL fans and thinking people out there that have warned out their Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer albums and thought that no one can make this music anymore.

Not true. Not true at all.

Being an old FSOL fan I bought this record with reservation. I was skeptical as to whether they would be back in their old form. Well kids....they're not. Don't buy this record expecting to hear the old FSOL because quite frankly it sounds nothing like them. They should have released this under a new side project name and marketed it to the indie rock scene. I rate this record two stars as an FSOL record, however, it's actually pretty decent in its own right. This is pure psycedelic rock, highly recommended for Pink Floyd/David Bowie fans. As a psychedelic rock record I would give this four stars.

Here's the deal -- it looks like Hypnotic has released not one but two different versions of The Isness in the states. First there's the digipak version, with the lineup mentioned above (it starts with "Elysian Feels"), but there's also a version in a jewel box (same catalog number, same label, same UPC, same title as the digipak version) that starts with "The Lovers." Each disc has a couple of tracks not on the other disc, and the mixes and lengths of the "duplicate" tracks are different. Which version will you get when you order? I have no idea.

The good news: both are completely loopball, over-the-top trips into densely-packed 60's-style psychedelic musical landscapes, combining sitars and guitars with samples and sequences.

The bad news: both are completely loopball, over-the top trips into densely-packed 60's-style psychedelic musical landscapes, combining sitars and guitars with samples and sequences.

If you can accept that some of the album's going to be hippy-trippy business, and you can sit through a little bit of plaintive prog rock, there are deep rewards in store for you. Even though the sound may be very different, this still is the Future Sound of London, and that means that dense ambience ultimately collides head-on with screeches and blips and looped heavy beats in addition to the newly rediscovered violins and sitars. On the other hand, if you're expecting the slick neo-futuristic dance-beat crunch of early FSOL, you will be disappointed. You're going to have to be adventurous for this one. You're going to have to step outside of the electronica/IDM/illbient mold and embrace fuzzboxes and horn sections and Revolution Number 9-era tape loops grooving alongside S900s and Atari STs. You're going to have to accept long, doodling solos and overwrought production values. You're going to have to watch the sloppy, analog mind-bent blissed-out human creative process duking it out mano a mano with the precision of today's computer processors.

But it's time for that. If you're still living in the year 2000 and want to listen to blips and clicks, To Rococo Rot is just a search field away. If you want to hear something astonishing and silly and gigantic and bizarre and new and stupid and retro all at the same time, give this one a try.

Uh, whichever one you happen to get.

this is probably the greatest record I've listened to in a long time.this is what sgt.pepper and electric ladyland would have sounded like if they had the electronics and recording studios of today.and the production is just incredible.these guys are just amazing...
this cd was given to me as a gift,never new anything about fsol,
now its one of my favoite cds
this is a must buy cd.its worth the investment,you won't be dissapointed.

As an avid fan of psychedelic and ambient music, I think the music on this album is fantastic. But please, FSOL, no more singing!! I point to "Divinity" and "Galaxial Pharmaceutical" as the principal examples of the vocalist's serious lack of ability. Absent the singing, these two songs would be much better. "Divinity" is so bad that I must skip the whole section of the song containing the singing. The music is good enough without any vocals; but if conveying your message through mediocre (if not downright awful) lyrics is that important to you guys then I think you can afford to hire someone with at least a tolerable voice.

You really have to be kidding me.
After waiting all this time for a new album from FSOL, they deliver a complete joke.
It is a pretty good joke, but it costed me [money]. Why did anyone tell me how bad this was?
If you have not heard this yet, better download it first.
For those who are long time fans of FSOL, you will be disappointed.
trust me.

I'm from the fan base of FSOL lovers that belives Dead cities as one of the greatest albums of all time a definite high mark of the late 90's electronic music boom.

This almbum is a huge departure if you haven't already guessed. It' mildy dissapointing for the Fans of Dead cities that never got that "follow" up to Dead cities that we always wanted. Since dead cities is such a special one time completly different and original peice of art. This album desereves its 5 stars based on its own merit. It's completely different (almost on a daft punk/radiohead scale of reinvention) and it appeals on a completely different level than the other almbums (more psychadelic-instrumental floyd-ish maybe even ziggy startdust) So it stands with reason that the album will have a different fan base. I think as a project its more "whole" as a concept than dead cities, but i think its high points don't climax as high. Still better that most music out there by far.. deserves a 5 all the way

Where is XTC when you need them? This is probably the worst attempt at "trippie hippie" music I've ever encountered. I bought this because I was blown away by the ambient techno music by this "band," but the music on "The Isness" has almost no relationship to that music - it's horribly cliched in the most unimaginable way. Obviously, FSOL diligently studied the music of the Incredible String Band in order to prepare for this outing, but this comes off as a pathetic parody of the ISB.

If you loved "Lifeforms" or "Dead Cities", you'll probably hate this. It has none of the imagination of those albums. It's tired it's boring, it's dead on arrival. If you want 60s psychedelia/trippy folk, go back to the sources, because what you're looking for won't be found on "The Isness".

Everyone seems to like this album of hate it. As a longtime FSOL fan, I definitely didn't see it coming, but having bought the thing just out of habit (I was initially skeptical), I can firmly plant myself in the former camp. This disc is TIGHT.

By now, of course, you should be fully aware that it's not traditional FSOL (if there is such a thing), but is rather a tripped-out psychedelia homage that sounds like outtakes from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, or maybe early Pink Floyd. But although the 30-second clips on this site are relentlessly unflattering, this is not an obnoxious 63-minute dip into mediocre sitar samples and boring ambient washes to burn incense by, but rather an energetic, cohesive update on a genre that supposedly tired itself out three decades ago.