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Terre Thaemlitz, "Lovebomb"

While I love sociological criticism woven into art, if it is so deliberate that it is an album's strongest point, I'm bound to be disappointed after the first listen. That being said, Lovebomb is an extremely well-founded concept album about love and the expression of culturally specific social processes, an overarching thesis that I won't attempt to evaluate. Thaemlitz covers many angles and perspectives in his exploration of this ubiquitous emotion, using generally interesting, but sometimes run of the mill, electro-acoustic music.

Mille Plateaux

The listener is first welcomed with some glitched-up, timestretched-out pop music; the meandering piano line and horribly distorted vocals reference music's obsession with "love." The track is convincing without coming off as overly clever. The second song, constructed from an African National Congress radio speech calling for "reactionary violence" against colonial oppressors, uses cut-up and lightly flanged spoken word in a result that slightly resembles the tonalities of traditional African singing. It's interesting at first but not something I'd like to listen to repetitively. "SDII" begins with Sammy Davis' computer-processed call for restraint following the assassination of Martin Luther King; then the dialogue fades into an immense, and slightly unsettling, drone. "Lovebomb" is incomprehensibly lush, progressing though gentle washes of synthesized and edited sound, orchestral samples, and chaotic walls of noise, without the music ever being truly interesting. The subsequent track contains some simple, plaintive piano melodies and a recording of Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, all subjected to digital manipulation so that they're entangled in a gentle web of sound, as it explores relationships between futurism, fascism, and racism. This piece probably contains the most music-driven emotional impact. "Signal Jamming Propaganda" combines the word "love," excerpted from various pop songs, for an amusingly schizophrenic, but quite expected, montage. The last few tracks continue to be thought-provoking in their perspective and material, but not so much in their music, and the final "bonus dance track" is catchy in a non sequitur and superficial sort of way. Lovebomb, as a whole, is good but inconsistent, and its sociological criticism is almost too overt for me, so in the end it is just a slightly above average electronic album. 

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