15/05/2005

Fischerspooner - Odyssey

entry posted by Inquisitor at 1:16 (permalink).
categories: Music

By rights, you should hate them and everything they stand for - a couple of New York art prats glad to define themselves under the 'electroclash' term discredited by almost everyone else on the scene, who almost bankrupted a record label with their completely silly first-album recording costs (although it was Ministry of Sound, which redeems them a bit), who have once on the album given Linda Perry a songwriting credit, with self-indulgent bullshit on the inlay card, and who admitted in an interview that Casey Spooner is such a puss that he couldn't sing the word "war" without much persuasion...

And yet I can't help but like the album, Linda Perry, warts and all. It's just too good to hate. Quandary, isn't it? Fischerspooner have, against the odds, managed to make a coherent and surprisingly wide-ranging electropop album that's actually worth buying; something they were threatening to do with Emerge and Turn On but didn't quite manage to do elsewhere. It sounds like they've used more instruments on the album, which helps it a lot; in fact, even the variation in lyrical style (from Spooner's own compositions to David Byrne) helps the project; Mirwais, miracle-worker on Madonna's Music and American Life (rescuing awful, awful songs and making them sound interesting), does additional production on most of the tracks; and at least it doesn't have the arrogance surrounding it that #1 had (from the title on).

Besides, "Just Let Go" is one of my electronic singles of the year so far, although I haven't heard the new single mix of Ladytron's "Sugar" yet - I did hear the Thinking XXX version, but apparently it's very different; and from my impressions of the demo if they release "Destroy Everything You Touch" it'll steamroller everything else out there. Besides, it's a step up from a fucking awful remix of "Axel F" featuring C**** F***, isn't it?

It's embarrassing to say this, I know, but this album's actually worth buying. Besides, at least I still hate the Libertines...

Other albums that aren't as bad as Pitchfork Media says they are: Garbage, Bleed Like Me (actually a fantastic album). Funny world, isn't it?

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