Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A rose by any other name still rocks the house, 13 Jun 2007
The third full-length album from Chris Clark -now going simply as Clark- is his most accessible yet. That ain't saying much, though, believe me. His speaker shredding laptop IDM is still as dense as a knee to the face, but Body Riddle's beats maintain a certain tribal hip-hop groove to them easily locatable by anyone with a heart while still being nightmarish enough to be thoroughly enjoyed by any fan of WARP Records' isolated android graveyard soundscapes. A rose by any other name still rocks the house.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Magnificent but.., 15 Oct 2006
Have been following Clark for some time, but this is probably his best effort to date (except the extraordinary 3" Throttle Furniture).It features a couple of rethinks of Throttle material - not always an improvement - and pleanty of variety in the new stuff - Herzog is a standout, a threatening deep. black sound which comes at you in waves, before the pulse coalesces into a bullying metronome under a baroque, minor-key theme. Roulette Thrift Number features a never-ending screechy door sound and what sounds like David Thomas doing his thing somewhere in the mix. Vengeance Drools is classic assertive Clark, a drum roll beat punching home the theme, before leading into an Aphex-type land of fog. Around these are less incisive numbers, always inventive but not always appealing and verging on the doodling that used to characterise Clarks's stuff. Overall, if you like electronica with a sad face and plenty of humanism, you won't find more startling sounds this side of Richard James
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4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Autumnal Crush, 30 Jan 2007
Is electronica dead? Its certainly quite easy to trace the influences of Chris Clark's Body Riddle. There are the tape-damaged keyboards patented by Boards of Canada; the rough jazzy breaks and dusty sampling of early DJ Shadow, whose influence over electronica has been understated; and the sped-up glockenspiels popularised by Kieren Hebden. Other influences might include Shadow disciple Broadway Project, BOC disciples Kelpe or the creepy lo-fi tape loops of Colleen. The question is whether it proves greater than a sum or its parts. At times it does, but at others Clark seems to pile on the effects and the influences to the point of overload, where a less is more approach is sometimes more effective.
Opener Herr Bar is the album's most immediate track: rollicking Shadow-esque breaks, distorted synths and broken music box chimes (or is that a glockenspiel!) building compellingly until everything seems to get get sucked dramatically into a vortex of slippery backwards effects. Frau Wav is a top heavy layered cake of musty samples and hazy orchestration in the mold of said DJ's Endtroducing. Herzog is a tediously pointless four minute demonstration of how to use a 303, one acid squall note pattern repeated and tinkered repeatedly to little consequence. Ted is less derivative, with its slightly deranged, dischordant keyboard loops over headnodding percussion coming off like an electro Philip Glass. Roulette Thrift Run is menacing, stylish dancefloor electro embellished with saxophone squeals and whispery scat singing. Vengeance Drools is a derivative Shadow/Broadway Project piece with some irritatingly uninspired one-finger piano playing. Matthew Unburdened begins promisingly with some lovely keyboard effects but gets bogged down in po-faced orchestrations before petering out. Night Knuckles, with its 1000 bpm chimes (yes, glockenspiels!), is embarrassingly close to Four Tet's Spirit Fingers, which has already been plundered by numerous artists (e.g. Pedro). The Autumnal Crush overloads the musical pallet in a kind of post-rock (think Mogwai) style sonic release.
Criticisms aside it's an extremely well accomplished and atmospheric album most hardcore electronica fans will have little to complain about - bleakly autumnal and heartfelt. But it remains to be seen when and if a totally new and original voice will come out of electronica to shake things up a bit.
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