Danny Hyde's Nonsense

Danny Hyde's Aural Rage (awful name, Danny!) A NatuRe of Nonsense album arrived last week and I've been trying to get to grips with it. For those who don't know, Danny Hyde is perhaps best known for his production work on several Coil albums, notably Love's Secret Domain and there are more than a few echoes of Coil's 'dancier' (always a misnomer) stuff throughout this new album though it (perhaps intentionally) lacks the immaterial goblin-spun atmosphere of Coil's best work, utilising many of the same squeaks and swirls and bells and echoes but somehow coming across as slightly more grounded (a faraway George Bush can be heard filtering through one track) and less psychoactive.

The music is generally dense and speedy as opposed to dense and lysergic and some of the production sounds a little like it needs to be stretched out for full comprehension, a trait associated with the 'lost' Coil album Backwards (wonder if we'll ever get to hear this in it's finished version? - the stuff I have seems a little undernourished).

Perhaps i'll investigate later with some time-stretching molecules and see what I come up with.

The tracks are sample-heavy; voices and chants falling over themselves to be heard amongst the frenetic percussion and at times Hyde overcooks a little for my taste but, Coil apart, much of this sounds like nothing else; it doesn't drift away into micro-technoid bleeps or breakdown into the breakbeat and glitches and tics and, above all, it adds a certain degree of (mostly) welcome silliness (the Stephen Hawking,Duya and the Radio 3 smut fest tracks in particular), as if Danny looked deep into Coil's music and saw past the dark heart and into the peculiarly English loonery that always did lived there. If Vivian Stanshall was around now, he'd be a Coil/Hyde collaborator - in fact, I'm sure he's on here somewhere.

Balance sings on a few tracks, Christopherson co-writes a few including a remixed but a little unecesary version of Nasa Arab. If you were ever a fan of Coil there's whole chunks of this you'll definitely love (and let's face it, this is as near as you're gonna get to Coil) but I can't help but feel a little disappointed; perhaps because I had such high hopes that haven't quite been met. Danny Hyde is undoubtedly a skilled producer with his own more or less unique soundworld but perhaps his true talents lie in collaboration. Some of this sounds like he needs a partner to spin off of, like he's better at adding and deforming rather than creating.

That said, I don't want to put you off buying this, some of the tracks on here are the best things I've heard this year and you have to bear in mind I'm reviewing this with a minor mini-trauma around the sides of my brain that can't quite believe Coil won't be making a new album.

Aural Rage - Make Room For The Mushrooms

another rapidshare production