Johnny Rotten

Let me preface by saying I played the crap out of Vegas back in college. I listened to a lot of Tweekend. That one I didn't like as consistently, but it was still pretty flavorful. Late last week I stumbled upon a pre-order opportunity for their new album, the release of which caught me somewhat offguard. But I grabbed it, because it was TCM, right?

Right.

This has got to be one of the most monotonous electronica albums I have ever heard, and it busts my chops to say that about TCM. There are sub-genres where a lack of changes throughout the song is acceptable and even a part of the style, as with goa trance and ambient downtempo, but acid breaks is very much at the other end of the spectrum. You have to hit hard, you have to keep distinct layers coming, and you have to keep their brains buzzing until the final note. You need all three.

If you were to judge from the preview preview clips available at places like Amazon, you'd think it friggin rocked the house, and it does...for about 30 seconds to a minute, at most. The killing problem is that the instrumentation consists of loops that never sound longer than two measures. The same batch of short takes is used for each instrument, alternating between chorus and monotony until the end of the track. There are almost zero chord progressions or key changes in any of the tracks, and few melodies. You're strung along with gradually added layers into the chorus, but the payoff is never quite as good as what the song seems to promise. TCM is just not able to bring the energetic chorus power they displayed in their previous work. I'm also hearing the same kick drum and warping acid riff I got plenty of six, seven years ago.

It also won't play on your computer--right off the bat, at least. You can't choose a program to view the CD, besides Windows Explorer, of course, which automagically sends you to a Flash-based video of "Born Too Slow" and gives you no option to play any track. No tracks show up in Explorer, yet of the files that are present, over 500MB is missing between what you see and what Explorer tells you about how large the disk is. Keeping in style with the mediocrity of the album was the mediocrity of the protection. I could view and play the tracks in WinAMP (version 5) and rip them to my hard drive. I could also start up Windows Media Player 9 and click on "Copy from CD" to open up a playlist there, too. WinAMP ripped the entire album without a hitch, and all the songs played without errors.

To make matters even more entertaining, TCM's handlers have taken a page from the oldest music industry trick in the book: The single currently in rotation, "Born Too Slow," bears almost zero resemblance to the rest of the album, but promises to embrace and extend the TCM sound you've come to know and love. Vegas was a musical milestone, and in retrospect, Tweekend was just a stylistic dalliance into urban, vox-oriented breaks, while Legion of Boom comes off as leftover takes from Vegas that have only been partially recovered in some misguided archeological dig. Too bad, because it's a waste of a good album title. In the long run, it comes off as an excellently produced arrangement of generic, repetitive acid breakbeat loops you could have bought online for $50 per CD, save for those shiny guest spots starring Wes Borland, Milla Jovovich, and John Garcia (former lead singer of Kyuss, a seminal stoner metal band). And what you end up with is a sound everyone else has made using those same loop discs.

Maybe this is just a sign of electronica running its course, like disco or hair metal, but I'd like to think not. It's been around since the late 80's, so we're going on fifteen years now. And it hasn't really blown up into a mainstream phenomenon, which has the beneficial side effect of preventing the stylistic self-limitations that come with following the popular sound in the hopes of following the popular dollars.

This is just one man's opinion, but I do recommend holding off on grabbing this one until word of mouth has had its chance to circulate. Sometimes a band only has one or two good albums in it, and The Crystal Method sound like they've run out of gas.

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"The idea that money doesn't buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich, to stop the poor from killing them." -- Michael Caine