Seven Souls

Material

Product Details

• Audio CD (May 14, 1990)
• Original Release Date: 1989
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Atlantic / Wea
• ASIN: B00000DP7I
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #209,742 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Burroughs on Dope Beats, May 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Seven Souls (Audio CD)

Take NY funk, add a layer of Moroccan soul, and top it off with a crunchy topping of Bill Burroughs, and you've got "Seven Souls." The rhythms of Sly Dunbar and Bill Laswell are slinky and cool, the airy Moroccan vocals and violins slice like razors, and the Voice carries us along on a journey to the Western Lands. The quest for immortality is the theme and it is never strayed from. Struggles more important than life and death are explored and questioned, leaving the listener to decide whether or not to pursue the prize. Highly recommended.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deep Stuff, September 4, 2001

By	Scott McFarland (Manassas, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Seven Souls (Audio CD)

I remember the times quite well; nobody else did anything as creative or startling as this in 1989. And you could hear the ideas seeping out of this and into some of the more widely-heard college rock.

Herein, Laswell and his co-conspirators create lush soundscapes where hip-hop beats meet Middle Eastern instrumentation. East meets West and it grooves very nicely. This all becomes a backdrop for William Burroughs to recite readings over the top of. The music is state of the art and Burrough's narration quite memorable also.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A true diamond in the rough, June 12, 2006

By	pineflint "pineflint" (Tokyo Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Seven Souls (Audio CD)

The aficionados of this album are a select crew and for some reason this hidden masterpiece has never become widely known. I heard it playing in a record store back when it had just been released and it instantly grabbed me; I had to own it. It's been with me ever since and has aged very well.

The music on this album is, in retrospect, almost startlingly ahead of its time, anticipating a variety of different sensibilities that became more fleshed-out in the 90s. A haunting, profoundly polished darkness glistens over the entire album. It achieves a high level of smoothness using "conventional" instruments and voices in combination with keyboards, rather than relying purely synth for such a tight sound as later artists would probably have done. In this sense, the music is a triumph of the outer limits of "analog" music, similar to some of the more polished work by artists working in the 80s such as Harold Blume, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, or David Byrne.

Burroughs' spoken word pieces are generally quite good, but the general problem with spoken word in music is that it often deters listeners from repeated listening because they think "I've heard it before." Or else they concentrate on the words to the exclusion of the music. Either approach would be a shame here, because the music deserves repeated listening. Fortunately, the spoken word overlays are not annoying upon repetition, are not overly intrusive, and are blended skillfully with the music.

Material explores some hard-to-define emotions and themes. There is a bit of the long, arduous, but beautiful voyage through the unknown here. The album retains a distinctiveness that has made it sound contemporary and not out-of-place at each listening over the past 16 years. Overall, highly recommended.