special introductory
paragraph!
Silver Apples
Contact
Beacon
Decatur
The Garden
The '60s were a "hip" time and "my bag," and nobody was "groovier" than such groupie-kissing guitar heroes as Jimmy Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimi Page, Beck, Robert Cray and Keith Moon. However, a New Yorker named Simeon was having none of it. Utterly bored shitless-ass by the wanking wah-wah sounds of generic diddle-fucking fuckdiddlers, Simeon became first intrigued, then captivated, and finally positively obsessed with the bizarre tones and noises he could squeeze out of audio oscillators. I don't know how much you know about audio oscillators, but here in the big city we go through 'em like straw through a cocaine's ass. You see, an oscillator isn't an instrument -- it's a piece of electronic equipment that generates one pure tone or frequency at a time. They're used in telephones, stereos, radios and all kinds of crap. But make no mistake - an audio oscillator is not an instrument, and you'd have to be OuT oF yOuR mInD to pretend it is.
Fresh out of the Insane Hospital For Crazy "Wheeoo-Wheeoo"s, Simeon created a gigantic Fun Board made up of nine audio oscillators and eighty-six manual controls. His band was all like, "No, we would prefer to play hot seXXXy blues jazz, so we quit," and they all quit. All except for one special gentleman -- a drummer named Danny Taylor who was as OuT oF hIs MiNd as Simeon himself. Next thing you know, Danny has a kit sixteen miles big, comprised of 13 drums, 5 cymbals and sundrey other assorted crap, all tuned up and ready to roll. Isn't this whole idea just driving you wonderfree with curiosity? If your answer is "Shit yeah, Mark. I mean... Sorry, I didn't mean to speak blue," then read on for I continue to discuss this phenomenon in greater detail in the following record reviews!
Cabaret Voltaire, Kraftwerk and Front 242 can all go sit on a duck because not only did electronic music pioneers Silver Apples sound completely unlike any other band in 1968: they sound completely unlike any band SINCE. Basically, they were so ahead of their time, it hurts. I mean it literally feels like little nubs are jabbing into my eyeballs! Little nubs with letters on them! OW! OW!!! JESUSS UVFUFF
I bet you a dollar that even UFOs from Outer Space (Mars) couldn't come up with such a compelling and bizarre mixture of whistles, feedback, beeps, whoozies, clanks, bipps, buzzes, whirls and theremin-style swoop signals. And not only did Simeon create them -- he turned them into MUSIC!
Granted, it's really rudimentary "music," as you can't really compose classically-influenced prog rock when you're playing lead and rhythm oscillators with your hands, elbows and knees, and bass oscillators with your smelly hippy feet. But just the fact that he has able to reign in his noises in a manner sufficiently "music-like" that the verses and choruses feature repetition and melody beneath the out of control beeps and boops should be enough to earn your respect. The fact that his melodies were also *CATCHY* should have been enough to elect him President of the United States! Unfortunately he was under the age of 35, which is a rule we have here in the States.
In addition to the swirls of racket so enjoyed by many in the Silver Apples fan club, Danny Taylor was one of the coolest drummers in history. He's all over the place, just snaring like crazy, but with a strict, crisp and danceable approach that not only foreshadowed future electronica (drum 'n' bass?) drum styles, but is also tailormade for these modern-day "sampler" "DJ" people who steal little pieces of other peoples' work and wear sunglasses. So steal away, DJ people! And wear sunglasses! There's no getting cooler than wearing sunglasses!
As for the lyrics, they're probably hippy-related if the song titles are any indication ("Seagreen Serenades," "Lovefingers," "Velvet Cave," "Misty Mountain"). Simeon attempts to sing along with his atonal breeping and brapping, but his light strangely-British-sounding little voice at times fails to make the necessary fit. But crap, YOU try singing along to this noise! This wonderful, beautiful, repetitive, spacey, computery, FUN noise!!! All beeping and chiming and chirping and buzzing with anarchic fuzzy glee(e)!!!
Also, I should probably alert you to the fact that, probably due to the difficulty of playing this "instrument," the band members seem to lose time every once in a while. But so does my computer clock, and at least Silver Apples doesn't tick and shoot out a little bird all fucking day. And sure, all the songs are somewhat similar, but it's all so different from anything else in the world, you'd have to be a Terry Reid fan to complain. Bang Bang, You're Terry Reid! That's what I said when I murdered him in his hotel room.
Tribal LSD dance music. For the Mind Expansion of Today. Woo-woo's, clank-blips, doopachicka drums, up-down carnival noises, reverbed dial tones, creepy sick notes, wiggly wild noise, disturbing feedback and wind noises, tick-tocks, boop-bip-bops, "brapp" horn-whistles, clinking glasses, low throbs, gongs, high hums, train whistles, and vocal harmonies. Remember now - this isn't "early synth music" like Perrey & Kingsley or the Monkees' groundbreaking "Daily Nightly" avant-garde experiment. This guy's just fucking around with pure sound. Which might be what early synth music was too, I suppose, but NONE OF IT sounded like THIS. These noises are a barrel of smoke alarms tossed into a theremin and rocketed to a far off Martian colony of morse code! Put them all together and you've got one of THE truly "stand alone" pop albums of all time. Buy it, and fuck the SHIT out of it!!!
Skip "Dancing Gods" though - it's just a bunch of "Hoy-yoy-yoy-yoy" tribal drumming and poetry, and it goes on for five years after you turn the stereo off.
Anyway, as it happens, I was listening to the Silver Apples record as I was reading all these comments; hadn't heard it before, and then at this one point as I'm being horrified by these cool people invading a loserly record review site, I suddenly become aware of the music that I'm listening to - and it's like beep beep beep and a guy with this dated sixties Cream voice singing on top. Imagine what would've happened if one of these Linkin Park fans would've heard this as I'm bashing their favorite band! Is it at all possible to make music which would any more precisely fit the image of old-people silly hippy music that uncool losers listen to? The beeps OK, you have just the beeps it makes for something weird; but when it's the background to basically completely normal 60's pop music which is dated in itself but starts to sound REALLY dumb when you take away all the choruses, guitars, heck, any sort of musical dynamics that would seperate an "exciting refrain" from a "ruminating verse" then it becomes some sort of bizarre experience like somebody would've collected carnival music, cheesy commercials, school charity concerts, Simon Says and French people and somehow would've stuffed it all into your living room for the ultimate uncool feel and being guaranteed considered a loon by your neighbours if you dare it play aloud (I don't). OK, so Mark Smith stole Seagreen Serenade for Bourgeois Town; but when he did it, it sounded cool; here it sounds just really dated and bizarre. Maybe smart creative people can listen to this record and steal it's music and ideas and make it cool (the example of Kraftwerk speaks against this though); I don't have the stomach for it.
(a few days later)
There's a mistake in my reader comment in the Silver Apples page. It's in the sentence at the end which goes "Mark Smith stole Seagreen Serenade for Bourgeois Town", whereby "Bourgeois Town" is a misspelling for some other Fall song whose name I don't remember. This is partly my own mistake as I didn't bother digging up the tape where I have the song. Please correct it.
On a personal note, I find this incident a bit shocking. Bourgeois Town sounds NOTHING LIKE Seagreen Serenades! Don't you ever check the facts you post on your site? What assurance can you give your readers that anything they read in the reader comments section isn't a slanderous made-up lie?!?
My throat has been hurting for days. And I don't smoke marijuana so I know that's not why. It's either a sore throat, Strep(TM) throat or one or more canker sores back there. Or throat cancer, I guess, if there's such a thing as that. I guess there must be, for cigarette people. Could throat cancer be caused by - oh wait no, it's "cancer of the esophagus" I think. Could that be caused by constantly filling my mouth up to bustin' with straight vodka? I do that about nine times a week on average. Does vodka burn the pores of your throat away? Or is it just a canker sore? Maybe it's sinus-related. It's allergy season and - oh! This is good stuff! Check this out. It's a different topic, so I'll start a new paragraph here on my LiveJournal blog.
A couple of years ago, some asshole Central Park security guy gave my wife and I a $160 ticket for having our dog off-leash before 9 PM (even though it was freezing and pitch black out and nobody was around). Ever since then, I've always vowed that if one of those peckers (birds) pulls up in his little pussy car to give me a ticket for dog-related activity, I would run away and refuse to give out any information. What are they gonna do? Chase me out of the park in their little faggoty half-car? So yeah, I finally did it yesterday. And I felt just like famous mafia figure Truman Capone!
In the mornings, I often let Henry The Dog off-leash to go chew on grass in this area of the park that has tasty grass. It's behind a fence so the only way he can get to it is to gallivant up this big paved hill, trot along the jogging path a few metres, and go in that way. Important note: dogs are not allowed on the jogging path. Second important note: Theoretically, dogs aren't allowed off-leash on the bridle path, although lots of folks disobey that rule before 9 AM. At any rate, on this particular occasion (yesterday), I saw that a landscaping crew was putting in new dirt and (presumably) grass or plant seeds just a few yards away from Henry's grass-eating spot. I knew it was a bad idea to let him go up there, but he just loves that grass so much, I decided to see if we could get away with it. We couldn't!
About two minutes after Henry entered the grassy knoll, a short, plump, probably gay woman came speeding up to me in her little white Losercar, demanding in serious angertones that I call my dog out of the area. She stopped her car right in front of me, got out in order to deliver me a lecture and ticket, and I calmly replied, "Okay," and TORE OFF RUNNING IN THE OTHER DIRECTION!!! I distinctly heard her grumble pissed-offedly, "Oh, great" as I ran in my fancy work clothes all the way down the bridle path shouting, "Bye! Bye Henry! Bye!" At first, he ignored me, figuring that I wouldn't actually leave him. Finally, I guess when he noticed that my voice was ass-far away, he left the grassy area and tore off running like a dog out of hell THE WRONG WAY DOWN THE JOGGING PATH. That's violating like five laws at once! As I ran, I watched over my shoulder bemused as asshole exercise person after asshole exercise person had to jump out of the way to let my sweet 85-pound beast race by. Important note: He ran right by the landscaping crew, but none of them had the courage to try to stop him. Not that he's mean at all, but he's BIG! And CUTE!
So finally he came roaring down the hill at me with a big happy smile on his face, I slipped his leash on, and we ran out of the park to safety. Fuck you, the police!! Or park security, whatever you are. Fuck you!! I WIN!!! (although now I can't show my face there for a month or so or she might recognize me) I WIN!!!
That's my tale of defiance. Now let's talk about the Silver Apples' ugly, annoying second album.
If the first Silver Apples album was a bubbly beepy psych-pop masterpiece, its follow-up is an ugly noisy experimental freakout. It seems as if Simeon is making a conscious effort not to repeat himself, but in so doing, he has created an album full of UGLY, IRRITATING and BORING material. Rather than quirky melodies built upon queer tones of wonder, Contact's tracks just sound like a lousy organ player performing simple, bland note combinations while a bunch of random electronic bullshit squiggles dance around at their leisure. If you're gonna make your oscillators sound like an organ, why not just play a damn organ!?
With its ever-quivering theremin-esque lead oscillator making a migraine out of nearly every track, Contact is definitely more "free" than the first album, but I for one find it very unsatisfying. On the debut, it sounded like Simeon was barely harnessing unpredictable audio signals and turning them into exciting pop music. On this one, it sounds like he's learned how to harness the tones TOO well, and is happy to let half of the noises run free and create an atonal mess as long as he can create two or three boring notes out of the other half. Plus all the songs go on so long, you'll be old by the time you die.
There are a few great songs though. "Confusion" replaces the oscillators with a banjo to neat effect, "I Have Known Love" is probably the prettiest song in the entire Silver Apples discography, and the cover of "Ruby" is an uptempo fuzz-and-banjo hoedown. Plus, to be less sorely negative, I'll admit that most of the other songs at least have certain ASPECTS that are worth hearing. "You And I" for example, though essentially uglier than a penis, nevertheless features some wonderfully disturbing high-pitched motor and low vacuum noises within its din of racket. "You're Not Fooling Me" starts off pretty catchy too, until you realize that the band is going to let the telephone ring THROUGH THE ENTIRE SIX-MINUTE SONG. And "Fantasies," although it's basically Silver Apples' "Gonna Buy Me A Dog" (featuring 'wacky' asides like "I can't read my own handwriting!" and "I'm gonna change chords now, but I'm not gonna tell you when"), has a few moments of fascinating instrumental interplay, including one part where the DRUMS play "Ring Around The Rosie" before the oscillators follow suit.
However, "Gypsy Love" and "A Pox On You" are the same exact irredeemable piece of get the hell out of my yard. Just HORRIBLE songs! Two bass notes covered in shit. Remember when you shat all over your wife's tits? This is like that, but with bass notes instead of jugs.
My conclusion: An EXTREMELY low 6. Or... HIGH FIVE!!!! Silver Apples' Contact? More like "HAND ME A CONTAC cold medicine tablet for this headache you've given me!!!"
Or something with the word "Crapples."
A lot of people, upon first hearing the name "Silver Apples," immediately think of the Sonic Youth song "Silver Rocket." But that doesn't make any sense. That would be like hearing the name "Beach Boys" and automatically thinking of a song called "Beach Rocket." Or hearing about a genetically botched "Apple Man" and thinking of Elton John's stirring "Rocket Man." You may think I'm taking this too seriously, and that it doesn't hurt anybody if you're sitting here fantasizing about Sonic Youth's "Silver Rocket" while I'm trying to teach you about the Silver Apples. But you're wrong. In fact, you've never been more wrong, and that's saying a lot because you're wrong a hell of a quite often. Think of it - how would YOU feel if your name was, say, Nasa Apples, and every time you introduced yourself to people, they said, "Oh! Like a NASA Rocket?" I wouldn't like it one bit and neither would you. So please take this into consideration the next time you pen a rude article calling me "music reviewer Mark Diarrhea-nose."
Fifty-five years after Simeon and Danny Taylor parted ways for the best of reasons, suddenly a NEW(!) IMPROVED(!) Silver Apples hit the stage and screen. But no Danny Taylor was to be found -- Simeon had no idea how to locate him! Instead, Simeon - who lost his original oscillator board years earlier - grabbed two young men including Xian Hawkins on keyboards and Michael Lerner on drums (A hilarious joke for you: Q. Why'd you pick that guy, Simeon? He's terrible! A. I know, but he's 'a fast Lerner'!) and bought himself some NEW oscillators and keyboards to play around with. You'd think the resulting artistic sensations would suck, quite frankly, but you'd be wrong! It's a ball! A major league base ball!
Pardon me while I sit here and listen to my office building creak dangerously as it sways back and forth in the wind.
Christ, it sounds like people are swinging on huge unsturdy hammocks all around me. I don't like this at all!
Is this how people in the World Trade Center felt? Like a bunch of huge unsturdy hammocks had slammed into their building? If so, no WONDER they were scared and died!
But album-speaking, this is a MUSIC album, but not only are most of the songs catchy as a bird - they've got really neat electronic noises fwooshing and flooping all over them! Presumably Simeon hired a backup keyboardist to hold things together while his oscillators go nuts, but it doesn't cheese things up at all. It's a terrifically fun electronics record that would likely appeal to fans of Neu!, Trans Am and early Stereolab. There's SO much stuff going on in these songs - so many wonderfully warm tones, beeps and noises - and the songs themselves are pretty darn clever and diverse, ranging from dark to light to cutesy to pretty to funky to eerie to weird to sad. Plus, Simeon's singing voice sounds much less standoffish and faux-British in his old age, and he has more of a high, kinda low-power friendly gentle delivery.
However, there's no getting around one disappointing fact; there simply aren't many drummers out there who are creative enough to shine in this kind of environment, and Michael Lerner is just your normal everyday skinsman. Sure, he skins dead animals like the best of them, but when you put him behind a drum kit, he'd might as well trade in his sticks for two streams of urine because Simeon's gigantic brain leaves him wallowing in the mediocre dust of yesterday's alternative superheroes.
In addition to eight brand new compositions, the new Silver Apples rework three oldies to varying effect. Contact's "I Have Known Love" is streamlined into the gorgeous space age pop song that anybody who heard it already knew it was anyway and the formerly ugly "You And I" is presented in a much more interesting, tighter version (and sounds MUCH better in this context - rather than one of several irritating songs, it's simply a more challenging track on a delightful bubbly psych-rock-pop album), but the debut album's formerly awesome high-speed closer "Misty Mountain" is slowed down and performed like some turtle requested it. Why slow down a great fast song? This is the same thing I asked the Beatles when they re-recorded "Revolution" as "Revolution 1." Remember that? I do. And God help me, as I sit here and write these words in late 1979, John Lennon will pay for that re-recording.
As Holden Caulfield once pointed out, the f
In closing, if you like "kihh-kihh" noises, air raid siren swoops, video game bleeps, high windy whoops, dancy catchy sick and funky oscillator bass lines, blurbles, atonal vocals, constant washes of warm Eno-ey organ hits, beep-beep noises serving as lead guitar, eerie strains of LSD freakout audio, bomb-drop "beeeeoooo!"s that come down and go back up, hippy psychedelic cool-out drone music, happy wiggly up-downs, romantic love chords, twisted confused hooks, little whistling noises going up and down, tons of woozy squiggly racket, and strange toad noises in the middle of a ballad, you'll LOVE my homemade pornography!
According to the liner notes, "Decatur is a voyage of pure exploration beyond the broad established horizons of electronic music. It is an adventure into the perceptions of an unparallel universe all its own."
Presumably there's a typo in there or something, because according to MY notes, "Decatur is a voyage of three men making unrehearsed, unstructured, uninteresting noise that doesn't even APPOACH 'electronic music'. It is a SHIT into the SHITS of a SHITTY SHITLAND SHIT SHITS SHIT." Come on, it's just a bunch of "voop-voop-voop!" noises for 45 minutes! Here, here's a description I wrote while counting down each excruciating second until the "avant-garde" wasteland reached cessation and I could sell it on ebay: wooop! rising tone, cymbals, then high-pitched UFO noises and bass drums, then UFO squiggles and bloobles, high-pitched tone and smooky noise. Boop-boop beat. High tones squiggly and then some xylophone hits and warbles. Then more boring voop-voop-voop. JESUS GOD'S SMELLY ASS! SO BORING! The noises are dull and flat and nothing even approaches melody! Just minimal drums and annoying woop-woops and high-end feedback. Then it turns into TWO voop-voops at one point. Wow!"
As you can see, I was pretty impressed by the introduction of a second voop-voop.
In addition, there are two brief moments of inspiration that stand out from the rest like a pretty rose-scented candle resting in a morass of polluted urine. The first features about five minutes of bouncy videogame-like notes that are actually almost melodic, and the second revolves around some Throbbing Gristle-style vacuum industrial repetition. But are seven minutes of happiness worth aching through 38 minutes of three buffoons thinking they're improvisational geniuses? They are if you can keep your boner up for the full seven minutes, but how often does THAT happen? Not that chicks don't love it when you go soft while inside them - that's how they can tell you're a 'real man.' You see, when w
But are seven minutes of happiness worth aching through 38 minutes of three buffoons thinking they're improvisational geniuses? Not that Simeon is a buffoon; he's a very talented and creative man. But if you thought him incapable of making buffoon noises, you've got another think coming. And that think is Decatur.
I actually grew up near Decatur, GA (where they recorded this legendary classic) and had I known that Silver Apples were going to use my local facilities to record their only bad album, I'd have burned down the entire town like General Lee did when he stormed Atlanta in the Spanish-American War. Burn away, General Lee! As Mark E. Smith once sang, "The North Will Rise Again!" He was talking about England though.
You know me I love everybody, but if there's one thing I can't tolerate it's a lesbo. It's not that I don't think they should have the right to get married or have children and it's not a personality thing I like watching them on the Internet too and it's not how they talk like men and have mustaches or anything it's the hair. I was just watching the afternoon edition of that Regis game show Who Wants To Be Dinah Shore? Whose Altar Ego Is Dinah Shore? and I couldn't help but notice lesbo hair all over that hostess lady. Short on top and all around, but long in back. That is a HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE - one sec while I check my thesaurus
UNPLEASANT, ABHORRENT, ABOMINABLE, APPALLING, AWFUL, BEASTLY, CRUEL, DETESTABLE, DISAGREEABLE, DISGUSTING, DREADFUL, EERIE, EXECRABLE, FAIRY - "Fairy"? "Fairy" is a synonym for "horrible"? I guess Roget's New Millenium Thesaurus hates fags as much as I hate lesbo hair! But let's move on to a more important topic: Rights. How often are we granted NEW rights? It seems like my rights are constantly being taken away (especially regarding where I can let my dog off-leash), but nobody ever gives me any new ones. Could somebody vote in a politician who champions FREEDOMS, please? I need some new rights. Like why can't I scrub my balls in the library? And why can't that 13-year-old girl in Florida get an abortion? These are two issues of equal importance, and all we're getting from the government is a bunch of B.I.B.L.E. (Big Idiotic Book Liars Enjoy) shit. In the words of Government Issue, "We ain't got - NO RIGHTS!" Iggy Pop was wrong when he sang, "I Got A Right." The Public Beastie Enemy Boys were right when they sang, "You gotta fight for your right to party for your right to fight." And Billy Joel was completely off-topic when he sang, "You may be right; I may be crazy." Were I to continue that verse, I would rewrite the second half as "But it just may be a poor songwriter and short ugly man you're looking for" to appeal to today's hip sophisticated jaded rebellious anarchy kids.
If you get the slight impression/That I'm stuck in this digression/Make a run for the concession/Til I've finished my Anne Hechen'. BOOSHIZYAHHHHHSHAZIZZLE!
Actually Anne Heche is straight again I think. And a genius.
In 1996 or so, Danny Taylor heard the Silver Apples played on WFMU Radio in New Jersey, home of Tom Scharpling's "The Best Show On WFMU" program, and called in to say, "That's my old band!" Shortly thereafter, WFMU contacted Simeon, who arranged a reunion with Mr. Taylor, and they found a box of old unreleased 1969 Silver Apples recordings and drum solos in Danny's attic. Next thing you know, Simeon adds some simple little gurgly melodies to the drum solos and the whole Shebazz (wife of civil rights activist Malcolm X) is released as The Garden!
What you'll find here is well worth your while to find here -- four never-before-heard Apples compositions, three lost cover tunes and seven catchy beats with simple and repetitive but fun little melodies on top that probably drag on too long, but at least there are funny noises on top! But be sure not to mistakenly buy a monophonic copy. Make sure the cover says "The Apples In Stereo."
It's clear from the unreleased finished tracks that the dueling duo were pursuing a more melodic direction after the chaotic Contact, creating calliope-style circus-toned melodies free of the whirling dervish of unpredictable oscillator signals that made up their previous work. But they're good songs! A couple of traditional tunes are tackled with Civil War marching glee and banjo blues Canned Heatery, "Mustang Sally" continues to suck and not deserve to exist, and the four originals present a (1) tough-and-funky psych-rock, (2) quirky novelty bounciness, (3) adorable nursery rhyme and (4) overmodulating funk rock side of the band that longtime fans will both cherish and relish.
God I fuckin' love Cher-ish relish. It's all green and tastes JUST LIKE her pudenda. One time I shoved a spoonful up my a
And the drumbeat ones (or "noodles," as Simeon calls them) are mucho overlongo, but for a minute or two you can't beat the charming little guys. Squiggles, whoo-whoos, wheezes and byoops. One song even sounds like FIRE ANTS!
Actually, lately everything has been sounding like fire ants. But we don't get much traffic around here, what with all the sand and the two vertical panes of glass.
I would like to express here my disgust for the band Linkin Park. I don't really know why exactly here, the argument "find the one band no Linkin Park fan would ever be seen within a mile of" must have played some role. I've never heard their music, it's just this sickening impression I got from reading the reader comments for their album on this site, it's really some of the most disturbing crap I've ever read. Can someone explain why is it that these morons keep saying the same thing over and over, "Linkin Park really helped me through my depression", "my brother died in a car accident and then I listened to this album and it helped me through", "one day you'll get really depressed and then you'll need this album" - christ, it's like it's some preacher or a self-help record or something. And the argument is that this is great music because it HELPS you, like, you know, "Highway 61 revisited" won't help you get over your brother dying in an accident so it's not great music; obviously, if there are these magical depression-curing records out there then it'd be really stupid to say that records which have no value in "giving strength" and "supporting" are great just because they have some sort of interesting musical qualities which connaisseurs can appreciate - I mean, it'd be the same thing as insisting that medicine that doesn't cure anything is great because it comes in a really neat package, wouldn't it? The disturbing thing is that it's so obvious that many people really think that way, like for them music is just something "for the mood" and then a record comes by that somehow actually "helps" them, and they find that so fantastic. I lost count of how many times people mentioned the phrase "real world" on the Linkin Park page; these are all the people who understand the real world so much better than you, "understand" how bloody silly it is to collect all these records and take them very seriously and sit in your apartment and listen to them "all day" (as they would phrase it), while other people are out there "having a life" and "facing the real world" etc etc. Music for most people is something that plays in the background as they try to pick up girls or "have fun", or something to play in their new car, and the "cool" people even deliberately don't go much into it because they vaguely feel that all those losers with long hair probably know their way around music better than they do, so they just blast whatever they happen to have bought really loud and make fun of everything that's "old" or "loserly". So imagine if someone with that attitude to music actually has this bizarre experience of "being strengthened" as he listens to a record - that's like "for real"! Music that matters! And I mean it's just some bizarre psychological effect, like when people get all crazy when listening to some preacher. That's why I hate this fucking band I've never heard; music is about being arty and non-real-world and not seeing things like they only matter when somebody is helped in some "concrete way" or you make a guy feel better when his brother dies. That's what parasitic scum in white collars do at funerals for money; music is about as far removed from that as possible. That people who actually get into a band and play music would try to appeal to a crowd who would never in their life be able to comprehend why a "normal guy" would spend hours dicking around in his own room with a guitar and a record player, that's like the biggest sell-out ever. That's like trying to help people who've spat on you and everything that you stand for. Maybe they all Jesuses or something.
This record, along with An Electric Storm by White Noise, are two of the bigger masterpieces of the 60s avant-garde. I'm pretty new to this album but already I can see who has picked up influence from it and the list is endless. You're right about this album in every way, from 'Dancing Gods' being a bit rubbishy, to the lack of variance - which doesn't matter much because the whole record creates a fulfilling mood for its duration. Great sound, well worthy of a 10.
Goofy as hell, but endearingly bizarre!
That sure is one hell of an album. I first heard about the band whilst I was looking through the influences for the Krautrockers when their name came up under both Brian Eno and Kratfwerk. Bought the album the next day, and played the shit out of it for more than two weeks! I wuld just sit there and stare into space as I listened. COuldn't honestly believe that the album came out in '68; I was expecting it to be a typo for 98 or something. And Simeon's voice is real sweet!! That album was probably the first spark of my journey into all this avantgarde stuff I've been digging into since, and it's definitely the first real "underground" record I ever got (I've since told myself: "The Velvet fucking Underground are fucking famous, you fucking idiot!!")
I was a mere teenager when I first heard the Silver Apples on the radio one Saturday night. Even with all the various types of music in the late 60's this sound was nothing like any of the others. I bought the album and played it for weeks, along with others. The decade of the 60's.... when music was music, not a redundant decade as the 70's, 80's and on through today
Front 242 should not be mentioned with Cabaret Voltaire and Kraftwerk; they are not worthy of such illustrious company. I agree about Silver Apples...it blew me away.
I still find it hard to believe.
Hmmm, can't say I agree with you here, since "A Pox On You" is one of my favorite songs, but CONTACT is definitely the weaker of Silver Apples' 60s albums. Still, who else was really doing this at the time? I'd put this at a high seven or low 8 personally.
Buy Silver Apples as well as CDs by a band called Silver Apples by clicking on this, a link! (And be sure to click on the album cover artwork to unveil cheaper used cd prices)
Git on back to Mark Prindle's 'Lil Dogies and Record Reviews, Y'hear?