5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Punk is so, so, soooooo dead!, June 11, 2002
This review is from: Never Mind the Bhangra: Here's the Opium Jukebox - A Sex Pistols Tribute (Audio CD)
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there was a small music label called Invisible Records. They hosted all sorts of avant garde industrial acts, like Pigface and Meg Lee Chin and Sheep on Drugs. The music was hard-listening, the very antithesis to adult contemporary music, relying on backbeats and way too many mind-altering chemicals.
Then something funny happened. The focus slowly drifted away from the industrial and into a weird sort of fuzzy land motivated, perhaps, by a different variety of mind-altering chemicals. Martin Atkins, Julian Beeston, Bobdog Catlin, and Rahul Sharma got together and formed a bizarre band called Opium Jukebox. They wanted to do some mystical-sounding Indian music, but at the same time, didn't want to stray too far from their alternative music roots. What to do, what to do?
They covered classics of the Sex Pistols, of course! And thus was Never Mind the Bhangra Here's the Opium Jukebox was born. ... It is not true to the original destroy-everything intent of the band.
I think that's why it's so amusing.
This is sort of a muzakked Ravi Shankar-sounding thing, with occasional elements of that Invisible Records sound I was talking about earlier. Only the barest bones of the original songs' melodies are retained. Everything else has been chewed up by a sitar and spit out onto a glistening, shiny CD.
I think Opium Jukebox have done for punk what Pat Boone did for heavy metal. Take that as you will....
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