Information Society |
Don't Be Afraid |
Cleopatra CLP 0120
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reviewed by Rob
The first cool thing about this CD is that you
get a bonus data disk, along with the audio disc, all for the price of
a plain audio CD. In fact, you'll probably pay less for this album,
which is on the small label Cleopatra
than you would buying one of the older Tommy Boy releases new.
Old fans of Information Society may be disappointed by this
release. The more pop, happy Information Society of the late 80's
is gone. In fact, all of the members of InSoc are gone with the
exception of Kurt Harland (AKA Kurt Valaquen). Now, Information
Society is a one man studio band that seems to be more popular these
days. If it were up to me, I would have changed the name of the band,
to reflect the new artistic direction (but then again, it's not my band).
I've seen a lot of snippy "this sucks" reviews on the newsgroups which
usually reflects the typical reaction of an old fan of Information Society.
(There's a newsgroup for Information Society named
alt.music.info-society which
Kurt himself frequents). Here's one post that I found kinda funny, and
I'm including it here:
The new information society album may take a couple of
listens before you warm up to it -- which for me, is a good
thing, since it signifies that the album is something that
I'll be listening for a while. Also, the album is listenable
as a whole, in contrast to the older Information Society releases.
The overall mood of this album is best described as dark and
depressing. It should appeal to that group of people that like
to be dark and depressing, you know, the type that wear black,
avoid sunlight, used to be into goth, and now are into
industrial. However, I'm not attempting classify this album as
being either one of these. Being depressed and sad is not
necessarily a bad thing, there's a lot of good music that comes
from strong emotions like depression and loneliness. According
to an interview with Kurt Harland that I recently read, this
type of music has always been in him, but you didn't see it
because Paul Robb was more the musical leader of the band.
If you're uncomfortable with depression, and you would rather
not relate with it, then you might want to stay away from this
album.
The music itself uses layers of sampled strings, so it sounds
symphonic and movie-soundtrackish, along with lots of cool samples,
interesting synth sounds, some electric guitar over driving machine-drum
dance beats. The highlights on this album are the cover of
Gary Numan's "Are 'Friends' Electric?" and the frenetic "Seek300"
(which has a really cool Spock sample.) If you need to hear the music
to make up your mind, you can go visit the
InSoc WebSite and download the MP3 snippets.
The bonus data disc is chock full of all kinds of cool stuff, some of
it was contributed by fans, while other stuff was created by InSoc's
Kurt Harland. Let me warn you though -- if you don't have a PC with
DOS/Windows, then you may not get much out of the data disc. Some
of things are packaged in One really unique and cool thing about this album is the puzzle/treasure
hunt for a track called "White Roses" that begins with track 10 on
the music disc. Like the last track on
Peace & Love, Inc, you'll need to play
the track and have a modem decode it. Basically, there's 16 pieces
of a .wav file located all over the internet, and you'll need to recover
them all before you can hear the track. You'll need a PC, a modem,
an internet account, a sound card, a CD drive, an audio editor, IRC
software, a web browser, and lots of hacker spirit, and lots of
cleverness, to figure this out. (So far, I'm up to 7 pieces). As
part of the puzzle, you have to decode the backwards message that
in between tracks 7 and 8 -- it had me cracking up pretty hard.
Personally, I really like the new album, and I'm looking forward to
the next one. If you like old Information Society, and at the same time
like darker stuff like
Front 242
and
Meat Beat Manifesto, then I bet you will like this album. If you're
into the internet and computers, you'll even enjoy this album even more.
From: goldenheart <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.rave
Subject: Information Society's new cd
Date: 17 Oct 1997 01:49:19 GMT
Organization: God Loves You!
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
It seems all but one of the band members of I.S. is left. He seems like
he's on a downward spiral. Very sad songs and it seems like he's on the
end of the ropes. I pray for him. Do the same, please. And also do
something nice for someone tonight.
goldenheart