REVIEW: Various Artists, Electronic Tribute to Pink Floyd (Vitamin)
- Wilson Neate
OK Computer! Yes indeed. Now here's an interesting idea, and a perfectly logical one at that.
For audiences weaned on '80s Classic Rock radio and lacking a sense of history, Pink Floyd might mean the following: a baseball-cap and mullet sing-along, a pot and beer addled (duuuuude!) knowledge of a handful of dull tracks, a zealot's commitment to the "traditional" values of "real" instrumentation played in a stadium environment and an attendant horror of the computerization of music.
But for others, Pink Floyd always signified something more interesting than dinosaur rock or a soundtrack to adolescent substance consumption. Indeed, discerning listeners have long recognized Pink Floyd's crucial influence on certain variants of a nascent British electronica/techno in the late '80s and early '90s.
Take the example of the Orb. Not only has Dr. Alex Paterson paid homage in cover art and titles (floating Battersea Power Stations, toy sheep and the cheeky title, "Backside of the Moon" etc) but, more importantly, the good doctor translated the essence of the Floyd's drifting, spacy ambient passages to the Orb's trance/dance/dub stylings.
And come to think of it, didn't the Chemical Brothers borrow part of their intro to "Block Rockin' Beats" from 1968's "Let There Be More Light?"
But while Pink Floyd were always more technologically sophisticated and interesting than mainstream rock radio audiences might allow, their link with "electronic" music today has less to do with their use of technology than with their willingness to re-imagine what a "song" could incorporate or sound like.
Even without the luxury of today's digital environment, Pink Floyd anticipated tendencies that became standard mainstream fare for later artists. These range from basic sampling -- the interpolated Liverpool FC anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone" on "Fearless," the realia and the pseudo-found monologue on, say, Dark Side of the Moon -- to the layful, extended appropriation and manipulation of non-musical sounds on tracks like "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast."
So, given Pink Floyd's prescient alignment with the spirit of much emergent electronica, this tribute makes complete sense. All in all, it's totally listenable and quite danceable, thereby finally making a reality of the somewhat ironic title of the 1981 Floyd compilation, A Collection of Great Dance Songs.
Wish You Were Here's "Welcome to the Machine" -- re-done by Vinny Fazzari -- is the most obvious song to cover in this context. While Pink Floyd clearly used the machine metaphor to signify "the system" and filled the track with austere technological sounds to make their point, the medium of electronica enacts that original message all the more directly. This effect is enhanced with the vocals being stripped of human affect to sound like Professor Hawking's computer mixed with Peter Frampton's vocoder.
T.H.C.'s drum-and-bass rendering of "One of These Days" is the most successful moment. It does precisely what the best covers do -- not so much imitating as creatively rebuilding the original. This is achieved with a seemingly paradoxical sleight of hand that seeks out your remembered version of the original by offering a slim, ongoing aural bone of recognition in order to set up the connection, all the while defamiliarizing the Floyd version. The intro to the track exemplifies this strategy as it takes the deep, plodding and resonant bass of the original and turns it into a one-dimensional, frenetic electronic beat that sets the tone for the whole piece. Despite their diametrically opposed sounds, you hear both tracks at the same time and that enhances the effect.
Similarly, "Comfortably Numb" -- as performed by Alex Xenophon -- is shorn of its original menacing, downer status and ends up sounding like Erasure with its light and jumpy vocals. At the end of the disc, the "acid mix" takes the idea even further. In much the same way, the preliminary exploration of "On the Run" by Cracker G serves up a driving house-lite version while a second pass by George Sarah turns in an even more minimal, speeded up, pots 'n' pans 'n' blips version of frenetic electronica.
Admittedly, some versions work better than others, but the only real criticism here has to be leveled against "Money" by Dynamichrome and "The Wall" (which is a composite of "Another Brick in the Wall" Parts I and II) by Alex Xenophon. These songs never needed to happen the first time around, so why do them again? Maybe more attention to early Floyd and a focus on more non-vocal tracks would have enhanced this otherwise credible project. Careful with that iMac, Eugene.
