Customer Reviews

Ye Olde Space Bande Plays the Classic Rock Hits

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

 

 

Each song is a very amusing cover of its 70's rock original. Quoting of all kinds of other material is interspersed within each song. For example John Paul Jones' synth solo of Led Zeppelin's "All My Love" is stuck into Chicago's "25 or 6 to 4".

"Cat Scratch Fever" is even more hilarious once the cat meows come in near the end. Everything changes enough to keep you interested and the overall fidelity of the recording is excellent.

"Whole Lotta Love" has snips of Pink Floyd music in the middle. "Rock and Roll All Nite" sounds beautifully stupid played with squeaks and sounds you'd expect to hear from a child's toy.

Total playing time is 43 minutes.

If you love moog, synthesizers, covers or just the songs done, you have to get this album! The Moog Cookbook takes some great 70s songs and puts them in instrumental/synthesized forms. My absolute favorite is "Ain't Talkin' Bout Love" but this album also gave me an appreciation of "25 or 6 to 4" and "Cat Scratch Fever". You have to have this!

I laughed and cried when I heard this album for the first time. Folks, they've done it again! Ye Old Space Band is a moog-lovers fantasy come true. Their rendition of Hotel California is the funniest song I've ever heard.

Forget The Producers and Grease! You want musical comedy, then give this a listen. Subjecting a series of classic rock era tunes to a synthesizer based reworking, the Moog Cookbook - Brian Kehew and Jellyfish/Imperial Drag's Roger Joseph Manning Jr. - is a band dedicated to hilarious deconstruction. Using moog sythnthesizers, here they cook up a series of versions of well known rock hits, and in many instances, actually improve the original; while I could care less if I ever heard Chicago's 25 or 6 to 4 or Ted Nugent's Cat Scratch Fever again, these versions breathe much new life into these songs. Their version, too, of Kiss's showstopper Rock and Roll All Night goes places that Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley could not possibly have ever imagined. However, while the Moog Cookbook have tongues firmly planted in cheeks, this is not merely an exercise in cheaps laughs. Intead, these renditions are really enjoyable to listen to as music. If you like bands like the Residents and/or music by techno artists like Daft Punk, you'll probably like this a lot.

The Moog Cookbook reinterprets classic rock hits from the '70s. This album brings a smile to my face. They came up with very clever and amusing arrangements of these songs on synthesizers. All of these songs have brief "quotes" from other songs within them. For instance, at the end of "Rock and Roll All Night" you can hear snippets of "Turkey in the Straw", "Camptown Races", "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", "Yankee Doodle Dandy", "Old MacDonald", "Swanee River", "Battle Hymm of the Republic", "America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America". And there are probably a few that I missed!

These guys disembowel classic rock hits even worse than their treatment of alternative rock on their first album. It's hilarious, and brilliant. Like a good funny movie, you're still picking up new subtle jokes every time you play it. Moog Cookbook is to synthesizer music what Spinal Tap is to heavy metal. My favorite part of the album is the break in "Whole Lotta Love," which is a tour de force of all of the most recognizable synthesizer noodlings from 1970s rock hits, and is a high point of humor in a very funny album.

My feelings for the originals ranged from love to hate. I love the original "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Ziggy Stardust" while I hated classics like "Cat Scratch Fever" and "Rock N' Roll All Night".

The Moog Cookbook breathed new life into my beloved classics and it made me love their renditions of those that I hated. Not only is it a novel album, but it is always fun to listen and dance to. For me, it has not grown old in the years that I have owned it.

When you play it for your friends, make them guess each song. That is the best way to be introduced to the Moog Cookbook.

The Moog Cookbook outdid themselves with this collection of rocker tunes. This album makes us want to forget the original artists. Rock & Roll all night. This is a sure hit at any campground, or any unsuspecting party. The sound of moog is, in one word, halarious. Three cheers for The Moog Cookbook- Monica and Enid

This is the next best thing to owning a TB-303, JUNO, MiniMoog or Speak and spell. This CD allows me to relax enough to get through my job without going 976-nutz. Also helps me to design high density microprocessors.

In the album "Ye Olde Space Band Plays the Classic Rock Hits" by The Moog Cookbook cleverly use Moog synthesizers accompanied by other analog synthesizers to create a remix of classic rock hits. These hits display rock music in a different light by drawing on the synthesizer's electric beat to create a more electronica style of music. By combing the Moog's sounds with well-known songs, the technology and genre reach a larger audience.



The Moog synthesizer is an analog synthesizer that was invented by Robert Moog in the 1960s. It was later popularized in 1968 by the album "Switched on Bach" which became one of the best selling classical records of that time. The Moog Cookbook is a musical group consisting of two musicians, Roger Manning and Brian Kehew. Their big debut album called "The Moog Cookbook" was made in 1996, and became popular due to their songs consisting of popular artists such as Green Day and Soundgarden. "Ye Olde Space Band Plays the Classic Rock Hits" was created in 1997 after the success of their first album1.



The use of the Moog Synthesizer in this album stands out because The Moog Cookbook is mixing different well known songs to create an original piece. These songs are introduced in the same fashion that Wendy Carlos used in "Switched on Bach". By creating a song that is similar to "Switched on Bach", the composers reference the album that popularized the Moog synthesizer. Though it does not advance upon the techniques shown in "Switched on Bach", this unique mixture of popular songs brings out what the moog synthesizer can do. In a way, this album brings to light a more modern rendition of what "Switched on Bach" had already portrayed.



One of the songs that stands out the most is "Rock and Roll All Night Long". At the end of this composition, the Moog Cookbook added in different commonly known songs such America the Beautiful, and Old Macdonald had a Farm. By adding this onto the composition, the musicians bring light to another form of music called mashup. In this genre, different popular songs are blended together generally using the instrumental from one and switching between the vocal of that song and another. In the Moog Cookbook's piece, they keep the backbeat of "Rock and Roll All Night Long" and then add the new instrumentals in the foreground, therefore creating a mashup that is initiative and reminds the listener of summer around the fourth of July because it includes a mix of American patriotic songs with children's songs including The Entertainer, a popular Ice cream truck song.



The use of Moog synthesizer to create different versions of popular music demonstrates the instrument's musical capacity, as well as introduce to the mainstream media. Since this album consists of classic rock songs that have been transformed into electric music, it is more enjoyable for the listener, particularly those who are a fan of the genre. The use of mashup in "Rock and Roll All Night Long" is unexpected and sounds more intricate as the listener recalls the other well-known melodies in the piece. Because of this clever use of music and synthesizers, I would highly recommend this album to anyone who enjoys hearing crossovers of different musical genres.

1 Prato, G. (2011 ). The moog cookbook: Biography. Retrieved from [...]