Customer Reviews

Rotund for Success

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

 

 

This is one of the best Sevs albums but that is a hard call with Gigapus, the Laptop Pop Series and Haul Ass also excellent. Tom Ellard, who is Severed Heads, has developed a unique sound since he produced the late 70s early 80s set of casettes under the Terse Tapes moniker. The hightlight for me is the Bad Times Three track included on some versions of this release. It makes you wish there really was a volume 11 on your stereo. Big Car, Greater Reward, Triangle Tangle Tango (try saying that fast) are all wonderful. The first two are remixed on "Retread". Start here and then get all the rest. And don't forget to check out the weird and wonderful Coklacoma featuring Ellard and Fifth Way Militia from Utah. Truly unique and original music. An extraordinary "band" with an equally extraordinary catalogue of music. There are maybe a dozen bands in the whole world who sound like no-one else. This is one of them.

Easily Severed Heads most accessible work, this album actually sounds quite pop-ish, until you listen closer and note how twisted things still are at heart. Still probably the most listenable Severed Heads album :).

Like a lollypop can be cherry flavoured but is still fundamentally a lollypop, this album is fundamentally a synthpop album with an industrial flavour. The synthpop aspect is the use of pop song structure and mostly old-school synthesised instruments, many of the songs being quite danceable (All Saint's Day especially will get you dancing, making it a tremendous opener) within this synthpop structure, as is often found with songs of that genre. However, the industrial element is especially interesting to me. Most of this flavour occurs in the vocals, which are melodically off-kilter and slightly distorted. The second most profoundly industrial aspect comes from the sample work, which is extremely odd and abrasive-- the samples will kill this album for you at first, but they grew on me; they're just so bizarre that they throw you off. They're not scary sounds like in most industrial, but the original sound that they've distorted is often indistinguishable; otherwise, the sounds are completely synthesised representations of a real sound (synthesised bird chirps on one of the later tracks-- one of my least favourite tracks for this very reason). But the most important thing to know about this album is that the lyrics are fantastic. They're dryly humourous, just complex enough (not overly metaphoric to where you cant figure out what they're talking about, which i find pretentious and silly), and deliciously nihilistic and anti-religion. For this very reason, this album will grow on you-- that is, if you're anything like me, and listen little to the lyrics of most of your music because they most often bore you or are indistinguishable. Remember that this album found some popularity in the past, and you can probably download it-- music is most often cheaper that way.