Various Artists - Spawn - The Album (Sony)
A few years ago a soundtrack album came out that broke the mould of
soundtrack albums. Instead of featuring b-sides and reject tracks by
popular bands, it featured some of the most experimental music of the time.
The album - "Judgement Night" and it paired hip-hop artists with
indie/metal bands, creating some of the most exciting sounds of the time.
This album seems to be based on the same idea, but instead of hip-hop it
pairs techno bands with indie/metal. Though, the division is not quite that
clean cut.
In the main, these tracks are collaborations, so there really is something
new in here. In the past, techno acts have done a lot of remixes for heavy
bands, but they have not been involved in the original work. Here it's
different, and it shows.
The best tracks on the album are the Butthole Surfers and Moby's
"Tiny Rubberband" - a slow ditty with a wall of sound backing,
Incubus and DJ Greyboy's "Familiar" - a very soulful dance piece
which sounds very like classic Faith No More, and DJ Spooky's drum and bass
remix of Metallica's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" - sacrilege in the
eyes of most metal fans.
The divide between the bands gets blurred on Marilyn Manson and Sneaker
Pimps' "Long Hard Road Out of Hell", Stabbing Westward and Wink's
"Torn Apart" and Soul Coughing and Roni Size's "A Plane
Scraped...". The question is which band is the indie band and who's
doing the remixing? It shows how deeply techno has infiltrated all genres
of music.
There are agressive heavy techno pairings like Filter and the Crystal
Method, Korn and the Dust Brothers and Silverchair and Vitro, as well as
dancier tracks like the reworking of Orbital's Butthole Surfers sample-based
"Satan" featuring Kirk Hammet on guitars and,surprisingly, the
edgy drum and bass of Henry Rollins and Goldie's "T-4 Strain".
There are one or two duff tracks, in particular the scream fest pairing of
Slayer and Atari Teenage Riot. "No Remorse (Iwanna die)" is just
a lightening fast mess of guitars, drum bears and male and female screaming.
It is very nice to see that somebody out there has an interest in trying to
do something new, and in general this album is a great success.
by Donnacha DeLong
