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Ashfelt, "Fat Space Acid"
It only takes a few, short moments to ruin an entire record completely. Why must obscene jazz samples (i.e., elevator sounds) be used in conjunction with beat and bass heavy arrangements? Those overly-vibrant, obnoxious, and sickeningly bright bass pops combined with dynamically static horn parts lead only to decay. The decay is obviously contagious as it tends to infect the rest of the album.
Ashfelt begin with what sounds like it will be an intriguing mix of dance-worthy rhythms, futuristic melodies, and all manner of vocal samples and found-sound noise bursts. After eighteen minutes of listening, the inconstant and disorienting style changes become annoying and the palette of sounds that seemed so rich intially becomes stale and rots away. Then there are those jazz-wanna-be-samples-of-death that literally send me over the edge. It kills the entire album just as it was starting to pick itself up from its little fall. If the middle tracks that contain the disease-ridden tracks are killed off and the secolnd half of the album is listened to by itself, then everything seems quite wonderful and even promising! Ashfelt takes the best parts of the first half of the album and rearrange and rethink them on the second half; the result is more diverse, more focused, and less annoying. It's as if the band suddenly became more confident in their skills and realized that they didn't have to jump back and forth between styles to keep things nice and interesting. The melodies in the second half are more virile, the beats cut across the sound-spectrum like a swiftly and skillfully wielded knife, and the amorphous sound collages gain a level of intrigue not present before. Cut out the junk in the middle and Fat Space Acid doesn't sound half bad. Perhaps the next release will see this duo become more confident (and critical) and thus more exciting.
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