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Amazon.co.uk Review
Whatever goes on in music, whichever genres rise and fall, you can always rely on Momus to be there in the background, cackling madly and intriguing/annoying the world with his latest collision of sounds. Having played the intense folk-merchant and the shabby traditional troubadour, this laconic and challenging New York-based Scot (real name Nicholas Currie) has turned to electronica for Folktronic. But, being Momus and fancying himself as a "minor god of mockery", he chooses to mix this shiny new form with the centuries-old tunes and rhythms of America, Ireland and his native Scotland, as well as the dockside shanties and vaudevillian choruses of his early career. The result is a strange collage that's sometimes silly, often hilarious and usually interesting. The opening "Appalachia" sees him dreaming of his "electronic mountain girl" over pattering percussion, sampled banjo and tacky, Stylophone-style organ, while "Mountain Music" is a pointed and lyrical essay on the origins of US folk set to a weirdly subdued hoe-down. Throughout, Currie proves himself (once again) to be a witty social commentator and an able comedian, his insights allowing us to forget the music's occasional descent into cheesy Frank Sidebottom territory. --Dominic Wills
MUSIC MAGAZINE, MAY 2001
"ALWAYS ONE TO SHOCK, MOMUS AMALGAMATES THE UNLIKELY MARRIAGE OF WEIRD ELECTRONIC RHYTHMS WITH FOLK INFLUENCES AND SOME... BIZARRE LYRICS."
"MORALLY PROVOCATIVE, MUSICALLY PRECOCIOUS, MONUMENTALLY PERVERSE."
"MORALLY PROVOCATIVE, MUSICALLY PRECOCIOUS, MONUMENTALLY PERVERSE."
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Having plundered the renaissance and baroque periods in his last couple of albums, Momus now skips further back in time to ponder the possible outcome of a set of Moog synthesisers materialising in the Appalachian mountains just as the mountain folk were preparing to play.
The resultant music is electronic folk, thus folktronic.
The opening track "Appalachian Girl" sums this up, a love song from one hillbilly to another accompanied by crashing synths and Baroque squiggles. Similarly "Simple Men" describes in increasing disconcerting detail the simple lifes of the Cabin Dwellers while discussing, philosophically, the connections between simplicity and evil. With a band of fiddlers.
By far the daftest, and therefore best track in this style, is a song to a "folk hero" - Finnegan, who is a Website Designer.
But as usual having had a wacky idea Momus can't keep it up for very long and we're soon back in his more familiar territory of Amadeus/Beethoven stylings and love songs to handheld computers. There is a marvellous parody of Gary Numan called "RoboCowboys" and a music hall song about his own penis that strays far too close to Monty Python, and then, inexplicably (wonderfully) it all turns into a progressive rock album, with tracks clearly aimed at Genesis and Pink Floyd. The closing science fiction epic Pygmalism is extraordinary, and showing Momus could have been a rock star if he'd wanted.
In short, if you don't like Momus, or have an allergic reaction to music that dares to be thoughtful and humorous, you'd better steer clear of this. But if you're willing not to take things too seriously, enjoy bizarre clashes of style and like albums that leave you scratching your head and saying "what exactly was all that about?", then this is perfect for you.
The resultant music is electronic folk, thus folktronic.
The opening track "Appalachian Girl" sums this up, a love song from one hillbilly to another accompanied by crashing synths and Baroque squiggles. Similarly "Simple Men" describes in increasing disconcerting detail the simple lifes of the Cabin Dwellers while discussing, philosophically, the connections between simplicity and evil. With a band of fiddlers.
By far the daftest, and therefore best track in this style, is a song to a "folk hero" - Finnegan, who is a Website Designer.
But as usual having had a wacky idea Momus can't keep it up for very long and we're soon back in his more familiar territory of Amadeus/Beethoven stylings and love songs to handheld computers. There is a marvellous parody of Gary Numan called "RoboCowboys" and a music hall song about his own penis that strays far too close to Monty Python, and then, inexplicably (wonderfully) it all turns into a progressive rock album, with tracks clearly aimed at Genesis and Pink Floyd. The closing science fiction epic Pygmalism is extraordinary, and showing Momus could have been a rock star if he'd wanted.
In short, if you don't like Momus, or have an allergic reaction to music that dares to be thoughtful and humorous, you'd better steer clear of this. But if you're willing not to take things too seriously, enjoy bizarre clashes of style and like albums that leave you scratching your head and saying "what exactly was all that about?", then this is perfect for you.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Having no experience of the art project to which this album seems to relate does not in any hinder enjoyment of the generous selection of songs. Be advised though: you have to set your ears to expect a quite restricted range of backing tracks, many of the casio keyboard variety. If you get past the first third or so of the album you are rewarded with some of the most outrageous and genuinely affecting songs of Momus' career. The ode to a town where everyone is a sexual criminal is so catchy and, frankly, very, very funny that you can disturb yourself by singing along. Best of all are the last few songs, trumped by "Pygmalism", an absolute classic, which is surely sung by a sibling of HAL from 2001. This collection for me rates higher than the much lauded early creation albums. If you don't have Circus Maximus then you could do a lot worse than starting here.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Momus in the Mountains
23 Feb 2001
Format:Audio CD
It's the year 2000 (still remember back then?), OS X is just about to go beta, and the flower power iMac is just a glint in Steve Job's eye. Our intrepid Celtic explorer encounters a crooked-toothed hick kid in the foothills of Appalachia and challenges him at gold Pokemon. Gameboys linked, they duel amiably by the light of a laser show..
Folktronic is finally playing as mp3 files on my Fuji 40i, after months of teaser Flash movies on momus's website, and it's well-worth the wait. The 'fake folk' genre that Nick's carved out is here in abundance, but it's not the whole story: we also get the fake prog-rock of 'Mistaken Memories', the fake Coward stylings of 'The ... Song', and the fake Brechtian epic 'Pygmalism'. Along the way, Momus also finds time for 80's pop and the exquisite baroque Romance of 'Handheld'. Kevin Warwick couldn't even begin to imagine such a delicate love between flesh and silicon.
I'll leave it to you to discover the other delights herein, particularly 'Appalachia' (in which Momus puts the 'corn' into Cornelius) the astounding 'Finnegan the Folk Hero', which nattily updates Dylan's 'Quinn The Eskimo' archetype with a tale of an exploited web designer. Where next for Nick? Negro Spirituals about the woes of legacy systems programmers? You need this CD!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
good
1 Aug 2002
Format:Audio CD
Probably the most idiosynchratic cd in my collection, momus has once again carved out a sound so unique that it deserves its own genre. I still fidgit in delight every time I hear that digital banjo on "Mountain Music." Maybe it's just because deep down I've always wanted to hear a blend of science fiction and folk music, but I think this is a pretty damn good cd. Though it's more of a "musical essay" and some may find it guilty of being "too conceptual", I think this cd more than holds up musically, as well. He's not just commenting on the regurgitation of American culture through increasingly fragmentary postmodern mediums, but he's making it sound catchy and giving it witty momus lyrics. If you're new to momus, however, this might not be a great starting place. You might want to check out some of his earlier albums before you delve into his cerebral genre-mixing experiments. I've also heard a few people enounce the album as "too silly" or as being full of "joke songs", but I think, similar to stephen merrit, Momus's primary goal is genuinely evocative, albeit sometimes intitially ridiculous sounding music, even if it comes across as smarmy, ironic decadance at first listen. One should also be warned that the album leans away from the fake-folk motif halfway through the cd as we get a silly song about momus's [privates](that I thought was far too silly at first, but like all of momus's body parts, grew on me)and a few sprawling epics that touch on the subject of Americana through heavily 80's lenses("Robocowboys" reminds me too much of a cartoon show called "galaxy rangers" i watched as a kid)and songs like "heliogobalus" and "pigmalism" that are just sort of bizarre and indulgent. Recap: digital banjos are catchy, momus is sexy, the future is synthetic,and viva la folk.
If You Get the Joke...
28 July 2001
Format:Audio CD
...then this is a brilliant CD. Whether he's name-checking Beck, Johnny Cash and Oprah or crooning about "Little Apples," he managed to find the weird middle ground between techno and folk -- managing to destroy both in the process.
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