Prince Rama Re(tard)mix Review w/ Transglobal Underground

For those that really can't be arsed with all the arsing, there's the proper review here.

"Rest in Peace”, the opening track of the latest Prince Rama album opens with a slightly strangulated House howl, the kinda thing you might have gurned circa 1990 (where were you?), which is then savagely dismissed without a thought; a discarded, non-devotional whore… the drum rumbles begin and then the Dead Can Dance Indian sweeps and suddenly we’re deep into what might be a psychosexual memory of Sinbad movies… a primary imprinting on chiffon and chant and painted ladies inside golden pots, concealed by red smoke… I should be clear, this isn’t intended as a slight… I’ve been playing this album a lot, perhaps because I’m imprinted that way too…

...you are too...

...especially if you think you're not...

...or maybe you're looking at this and thinking: I don't know a single bit of A Clockwork Orange argot; I'm not from your world, pops...

...I've never heard of Leela or the Tight Fit...

In which case; I'll try and explain.

No punctuation, or at least no full stops…only accurate way to understand where this record is coming from… it’s breathless dandyism, artful sabre-tossing and ultimately a little melancholic because the sounds of the east appropriated here (or rather, churned over; this isn’t a Transglobal Underground-style appropriation) are the sounds of Holly/Bollywood’s understanding of the east pre 9/11, when it was exotic and tameable… when no one was even thinking about atrocities or Hassan I Sabbah…when the evilest Arab you saw was Tom Baker in full-make up…

...actually I think I'm getting the odd sniffs around the internet (OK, so far just Jonny Mugwump) that Transglobal Underground might be due a comeback and surely now in the midst of MaybeRetromania (not read that book yet so I'm not really sold on the premise) this would be a perfect time for one of those timeless/utterly time-dependent shaggy Club Dog bands to make their comeback... the music definitiely has never gone away (found different beats perhaps, but not that different beats) and, actually, I find it hard to think that Transglobal Underground in particular could go away, being less a band more a condensation of a certain time, a few uncertain spaces... for you, this could be (INSERT Megadoggish drug-binge here), for me it's aligned to Brighton, sometime early-to-mid 90s where I saw Transglobal Underground and where the whole Eat Static inspired psytrance was about to lift off... in just a few days ethnic drones would be smeared over everything... right then, you could only look back and see, what? Monsoon?

(though you could of course blame Coldcut and Ofra Haza; odd how few picked up on this, or how long it took for everyone to align)

So... Prince Rama.



…it’s not all Sinbad (a lot is Sinbad); “Trust” starts off with an airplane drone and then add voices that sound like they’re trapped in another room before building into some cargo cult version of Gary Numan circa Cars, with some added flourishes from Danielle Dax…

I hear a version of She... the Rider Haggard version... unfilmed but out there...

…the Dax references continue into “Incarnation” which may be a soundtrack to a James T. Kirk honour duel on some far off Essex planet* while “Portaling” starts somewhere inside a mountain during the heart-sucking scene of Temple Of Doom and then sort of detours into handclaps and, bizarrely, pub rock-soul circa 1974…

<<< I've read reviews since writing this and they seem to know about Prince Rama (art school Krishna commune )... and it seems like the associations, these pretty little stabs at meaning that I make, are only semi-appropriate but...

Fuck it; I'm getting more and more annoyed with research-based reviewing. Occasionally, I give a shit about the context of a band (or what they meant to say) but mostly I don't; with this kind of brainfizzing confection, it's all there, it's in the open, there's nothing that re ---- search could bring to the party... >>>

Hectoring over...

You’ll get a lot of fun out of this record; its brain is grimy enough to past muster with all the Pocahaunted TDK fetishists but its bones want to be in the middle of a Bollywood set; lip synching and twirling imaginary balls of bird fat… it has colour, has odd breadth (and odd breath)

But almost no punctuation.




*This phrase was in the original review but I wrote it so long ago I'm struggling to remember what I meant by Essex Planet... it could be a typo but then I don't believe in typos so I must have meant something by it... perhaps I was thinking of Essex quarries (in all senses of the word, or two at least), perhaps it was just one of those sniping non-sequiters that I occasionally shovel into my word piles just for the steaming hell of it... I'll get back to you on Essex planet,,,

Spazzlings

Well, I haven't downloaded this yet but the picture of Ozz is enough to get the juices flowing. Ariel Pink wreaked (no, really) brother. And what the hell's Jimi doing not taking over? Browse around the site a little more and there'll be plenty of things the readers here might recognise, half-remember, find at the bottom of their tape drawers...

Lullabies From Hell

Reading this at the moment - it's manky manga; depraved and dissolute, very funny in a Brain Dead sort of way. Hugely uneccesary and totally beyond the still-born terror of the likes of the Ring cycle, The Grudge et al. There's eyeball grazing, popping splatter everywhere - made all the better/worse for the cheesily ecstatic drawings, with their quickstep melancholy (I feel bad/Must kill/Like to kill/Must kill again) - an odd, anti-calm pervades throughout, Hideshi Hino is not the least bit Zen... more like a Posy Simmonds strip seen through the gauze of Jack and Dinos Chapman or an aneurysm (Grand Mal?).

Fun Fun Fun ('til her daddy takes the t-bone away)

Exotica

If you were intrigued by the comment below re: exotica then here's as good a place as any to make a start... there must be a modern counterpart to this kind of thing out there; something seamed from whalehusk or antler or appalachian guthorns -a frog chorus made from steamrollered amphibian sighs, the pretty woodchip techno of deforestation...

Congotronics maybe.

A Perfect Sphere

...a perfect sphere, unknown in the Forest... the shattering quiet/weird moment from Merchant Ivory's Savages... spins through the air like an electron, lands in the world of the Mud People, savages waiting for a Pop Group cover, waiting for old (not classic) Nike trainers, Puma tops...

Mark Stewart And The Maffia - Welcome To Liberty City



^^^^^^^^^^ lots more on the Pop Group, MP3s etc, here ^^^^^^^^^^

not the one with PSH and laura linney, not this one...

this one...

the one with all the Danielle Dax lookalikes...



The New Age Steppers came too late, The Slits came too late...

The New Age Steppers - Fade Away

But although the tribal tremblings of those two are perhaps the most obvious signifiers, I keep hearing CocoRosie in my head while it's playing...

CocoRosie - Promise

Bunuel is invoked of course - The Exterminating Angel quoted (I can't remember much about that film, having seen it only once, years ago but I think I can tell how this kind of thing might have lingered in the memory, since watching a series of Bunuel films on telly all that time ago I still retain some residue of what I've seen, to the extent that occasionally, when I'm tired, the world does start to look like a Bunuel film)

And there's the inevitably Freudian riff on returning to the primal...

imagine Arthur Janov, watching both these films and rubbing with glee at the prospect of the middle classes tumbling into his soft-walled centres, eager to dispel myths, eager to let it out, emotional honesty being the holy grail, emotional intelligence being the final link in the chain...

let it out, just so you can prove it was in there in the first place, let it out, just to show that all that education and cultural capital hasn't entirely muffled their spirit, their we-moon, their inner Wolf Child...

scream if you want to go faster...

The use of the croquet ball in Savages is inspired; in black and white we could be watching a wguilt wracked (but, importantly, curious) Oppenheimer uttering his now famous grammatical glitch: "...now I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds..." or else it tries to elaborate on a theme that would come much later in the form of



Rogue Traders - Voodoo Child

where humankind were reduced to their essence - chuckling balls of steel, time-racists --- I think the Here Come The Drums refrain throughout those two episodes is an unconscious echo... the drums are all through The Savages, turning to jazzy skitters as the primitives turn to chattering middle classes (which echoes my stepping out of Jungle and Drum N Bass - once the jazzy fills started to take over and 'intelligence' and LTJ Bukem crept into the scene, I walked away and never looked at another Drum N Bass record again...)

another story...

((((((((((( (we are all time racists) - The Pop Group song that never was, the one were the ethnological forgery really took wind and Psychic TV's Themes records were shoved into songforms that pulled society apart at the primal level, alongside bursting samples from old Batman shows and snatches of Keith Levene guitar... The Pop Group never really did it for me, no matter how many times I've come back to them and tried...I want to love them but the earnestness and hectoring and lack of humour (in everything apart from their name) always put me on the back foot, quietly whispering: Yes, I know that... even Crass didn't always preach to the converted in such an obvious way... I'll probably try again, really do want to see what others seem to see )))))))))))))

The Savages uses various forms to tell it's simple tale: mock anthropology film (which is in fact uncannily similar to the real thing - i had a brief anthropology fetish in my teens), drawing room play, surrealism, silent film... and if form and pace (we languish until we love it) dictate over content then that's only because the content isn't there and shouldn't be...

Still got the drag queens (gloriously unexplained) to work out - I guess it could be just ugly women...

Here Come The Drums...

Sacrifice, primitivism, Murderous Rage, Return to the Woods - the ending ought to be the still taken from the latest Sig Ros album cover or maybe from Von Trier's The Idiots, where idiocy is paralled with creativity in the calmest, coldest way possible - though reality TV trumps all, as always....

Like the young Martin Amis during the Oxbridge Interview in The Rachel Papers, I'm not even sure if I liked The Savages.