Customer Reviews

Pick Up [Vinyl]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

i like the part where she goes, "i saw you, come on a-buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy," but then i can't understand the words, and then there's this one song where it's just her and this weird ethereal sound backing her up, and she's echoing all over the place...so damn beautiful. you should maybe give this cd to your grandmother and see if she paints anything interesting while listening to it, because mine didn't, and i was disappointed.

I am not really a fan of contemporary "electronic" music, but ever since I picked up (no pun intended) this CD on a whim a few weeks ago, it has not left my CD player. Solex is the most refreshing and original "band" that I have ever had the pleasure to hear, and having discovered them purely by accident just makes this CD all the more special.

Solex is definitely not just another pretentious "electronica" outfit putting out boring, repetitive techno beats with pseudo-hip samples bleeping and blooping all over the place. In fact, this barely sounds like an "electronic" album at all. Elisabeth Esselink has an amazing talent for "playing" her samples as if it were a real life musical instrument (and from what I understand, she actually does NOT use sequencers when recording or playing her songs live and triggers all the samples manually, which makes her talent all the more amazing). In fact, if you didn't know that the bulk of the sounds on her records come from sampled bootlegs of live musicians and obscure "unsellable" CD's and LP's, you would think that Solex is an actual "band", with real musicians playing all the parts. What sets Solex apart from the typical breed of electronica yawnmeisters out there today is that Esselink actually can write a compelling SONG, complete with memorable, insidiously catchy melodies, shifting drum patterns and very unusual, yet highly compelling vocal stylings. The fact that the samples she uses are *really* cool (theres a LOT of neat samples of different jazz licks) just adds to her already-solid composition skills.

Admittedly, her lyrics are ridiculous. But that's part of the appeal of Solex. Esselink sings seemingly nonsensical strings of English words with a Dutch accent that borders on being cute and kitschy (at least for wierdos like me who find european malapropisms spoken by females to be adorable--I just love the way she sings "His cyoote onn-dies..." in "Randy Costanza"), and at times, her voice is an absolute dead ringer for Harriet Wheeler of the Sundays. But don't bother trying to distill any sort of deep dadaist meaning out of her nonsensical lyrics. Esselink herself has admitted that she gets a lot of the words and phrases for her songs directly from American TV shows, which she writes down and ultimately uses in a song, simply if she thinks that the phrase "sounds" cool. The lyrics themselves become the canvas for her wacky, yet highly melodic vocal phrasing, instead of the other way around. It's very reminiscent of some of the better hip-hop and rap artists that have really stupid lyrics, yet deliver them in really interesting, rhythmic ways.

Standout tracks include the aforementioned "Randy Costanza", "Oh, Blimey!" (what an AWESOME bass sample!), the plucky "That's What You Get With People LIke That On Cruises Like These", the pseudo-industrial "Snappy and Cocky", "The Burglars Are Coming!", and the uncharacteristically punky (and catchier than all hell) "That'll Be $22.95". Admittedly, there is some boring "filler" material on "Pick Up". But the number of gems far outweigh the amount of mediocre stuff, so I don't think you'll find yourself skipping tracks very often.

Solex's music is challenging, make no mistake about it. But, unlike most supposedly "avante garde" music, Solex is completely devoid of any type of pretension, and has enough incredible hooks and groovy beats to ensnare listeners of even the most mainstream of tastes.

To my mind, there's nothing as good as "Solex in a Slipshod Style" here--though the first two tracks come close--but it's much less uneven than the previous CD, and the arrangements are more varied and playful. She sounds like she's having lots more fun this time around! Still, despite all its charm, there's definitely a certain sameness to "Pick Up" after a few listens. My solution was to compile a half-hour CD by choosing my favorite tracks from this one and "Hitmeister."

I have to point out that despite what many reviewers have claimed, "Solex vs. the Hitmeister" had live instruments all over it! Four musicians are credited on that CD (they play drums, piano, guitar, cello, bass, melodica, saxophone, and clarinet). Recorded surreptitiously in the back of a record store? Maybe some of it was...the samples, perhaps. On this release, there are guest musicians as well, and yet Amazon's description above says that it consists entirely of music "bootlegged" from obscure records. Obviously Elisabeth herself is not trying to hoodwink anyone, since she lists her collaborators prominently. So do people just read Matador's press releases and believe whatever they say, or is it a case of desperate music fans hypnotizing themselves in order to find something more about Solex to love?

(Regarding an earlier review...I'd say that Solex sounds more like a cross between the Mo-Dettes, Malaria, and the Bachelors, Even. And I think it's Dubuffet rather than Russolo who's dancing in some supercelestial realm...but gee, perhaps I'm being just a bit pedantic?)

The art of sample-collision has, over the course of the past two decades, moved from the remote, exclusive province of musique concrete inheritors like John Oswald and Christian Marclay, to the more populist terrain of hip-hop and the diaspora electronica of ambient, techno, and turntablism. The widespread availability of samplers and sound-manipulation tools has been largely responsible for this shift, analog "cut-and-paste" having been replaced by digital "sample-and-hold." In the field of popular music, the cross-application of these styles is still relatively infrequent, limited mostly to records like Who's Afraid [Art of Noise 1984], Escape from Noise [Negativland 1983], and Music With Sound [Tape-Beatles 1991] -- seminal works where chunks of audio verite collapsed, exploded, and superimposed themselves in ways that were anything but seamless. But the crowning achievements of this era are behind us, and their crucial tricks -- the almost accidental innovation, their sense of logic-defying discovery -- have been lost in a post-electronica sea of smirking breakbeat-jockeying.

Enter Elisabeth Esselink, aka Solex, with a debut album (Solex Vs The Hitmeister), recorded secretively in the back room of her Amsterdam record shop, that exuded a willful ignorance of the emergent principles of sample-based music: If anything, it sounded like Christian Marclay pulverizing a stack of Liliput, Delta 5, and Slits records and gluing them together willy-nilly. What's more, she actually sang -- neither the two-word happy-house sloganeering of club music, nor the abstract angst of alternative/industrial, but hilarious, subtle dissections of human discomfort. It was a beautiful thing. Yet when the news arrived that Solex's second effort would include not the musty, moribund music of her discarded 25-cent racks, but samples of live musicians and real performers, it smacked of calculation: Instead of the random and the unexpected, there would be the studied, pre-arranged sounds of jamming rock musicians, threatening at any second to disappear up their own post-rock orifices.

Thank the heavens, then, for steadfast iconoclasm. The new Solex album is upon us, and, if anything, Pick Up is even better than its predecessor. The opening title track has all of the eerie, disjointed majesty of "Who's Afraid," orchestra sweeps goose-stepping over rockabilly guitar slashes, percussive interjections, doleful trumpets, and abstract crowd noises. And Esselink's voice is even rougher, trading the subdued sprechtsang of Hitmeister for sing-song wordplay, jazzy crooning, and the occasional bout of freewheeling yelping. The "live" samples are, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from their predecessors, and the new songs swing, rock, and fall down with an even greater sense of urgency. Throwing a sampler down a flight of stairs never sounded so good. Somewhere, Luigi Russolo is dancing.

I love this disc for the musical universe it inhabits. Whatever you can say about electronica, pro or con, when I hear "Pick Up" I think straight-up rock and roll. I don't concern myself with how the album is made; I'm having too much fun listening to it. It's endlessly inventive and entertaining; this is definitely one of the records I would seriously consider if I could only bring one on a road trip to listen to over and over and over again.

I had read somewhere that the lyrics are assembled from bits and pieces of American television shows and other pop-cultural material, little turns of phrase that just sound interesting. So when I'm turning the pages of Elmore Leonard's Maximum Bob and find the phrase "Bright blue suit from Taiwan China," all I can think about is the song on "Pick Up" called "That's What You Get With People Like That On Cruises Like These..." which has the same line, sung, to a waltz rhythm.

"Pick Up" hasn't disappointed me in the six years since I bought it; I don't think it will disappoint you.

Pick Up has its charm. There are a few tracks that I like really quite a lot. The title track is really cool, and there are a few other gems on the album. But after you've listened to the CD for a while, all the songs start to blend together into a single, dischordant, synchopated soup. Actually, I still keep this CD in my regular rotation, but I can only listen to the whole album if I load it up in the player with a bunch of other, markedly different stuff and use the 'randomize' function... There IS such a thing as too much of a good thing.

I just saw Solex for my first time last night and chatted with them a bit after their set and they're really cool people. The disc - a direct reflection of everything they are. I loved them live and didn't think the album would be anything like the live version - as it usually isn't. I am not disappointed. Yes it is a little more laid back but not at all any worse. I really love it and would recommend seeing them live or at least picking up the disc...

If this album is anything to go by, Solex (a.k.a. Elisabeth Esselink) has a very strange perspective on life. Pick Up offers 14 tracks, each with imaginative titles like "That's What You Get With People Like That On Cruises Like These" and "Dork At 12 O'Clock". Each track describes an event in the life of the singer's character. These events range from the humorously mundane (finding out you got suntan lotion all over the stuff in your pockets) to the slightly disturbing (discovering that someone's hung herself). Whatever it is, Solex sings in the same detached, singsong voice about it all, like none of it really matters (not even the hanging, which is slightly creepy once you realize what the song is about). On her previous album, Solex vs. the Hitmeister, all the tracks were composed completely of samples from old records that Esselink found in the shop where she worked. Pick Up doesn't do this - the drums and guitars are live - but the same patchwork sound is present. Esselink will throw in a halting drum beat one minute, some keyboard work the next, and some crunching guitar riffs to finish it off - all seemingly on a whim. It's decidedly odd, but it actually works. Bottom line? If you're looking for something different and unpredictable (and have an open mind) you just might like Pick Up.

I was at a concert in Champaign, IL a while ago with Cibo Matto...Being a cibo head i was anxiously awaiting their appearance without really noticing the other name on the bill: Solex one drool enducing set later (complete with amazing cover of buddy holly's not fade away) i've ordered her cds and bought the matador compilation everything is nice. Do the same you people.

Awesome awesome awesome, a mixture between recycled garbage and a fine funky drummer. Check it out baby. Not bad for two a-sexuals.