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David Icke's decision to become God's turquoise-clad special
envoy starts to look unimaginative in comparison with Lesley
Rankine's career swing from Silverfish's chief teeth-gnasher
to Ruby's sensuous trip hop diva. After that, no one'd bat
an eyelid if Lemmy announced that he likes to slip into
cocktail dresses and play Dungeons and Dragons.
Chasing hard on the stack heels of last year's compellingly
bitter-sweet 'Salt Peter' arrives its sister album.
Suspicions of an uninspired money/old rop interchange
scenario are swiftly asked to shut the door on their way
out, as the eleven mixes here bristle with both diversity
and invention. Peshay applies the Metalhead's breakbeat
whetstone to 'Salt Water Fish', cutting it with trademark
diamond-hard drum and bass jungle corefare, while Monkey
Mafia load up on bleeping pills for the descending snare-tic
of 'Tiny Meat'.
STS reduce the vocal of 'Heidi' to an amorphous tonal
underlay beneath a bleak wash of dryly lifting blackened
strings, but at the DT-afflicted hands of [Primal] Scream
Teamers Andrew Innes and Murray Mitchell, the same source
material gets dragged downtown to an assuredly connected
shadow swagger. Less impressively, Red Snapper's 'Paraffin'
is Vauxhall Conference stuff next to the Premier League
skills of the original, sounding uncannily like the theme
from Tony Hart's 'Gallery' spliced with Clannad on finger
cymbals and double-bass.
However, such whingeing is small beer when there's such a
wealth of deftly-blended intoxicants on offer - here's the
state of the remix art in one foreign package. As for
revenge being the sweetest fruit, shouldn't that be
pineapple?
Ben Mitchell
Select
Who could forget those early, er, glorious Silverfish days?
Lesley Rankine rolled around screaming expletives, the rest
of the band did a kind of elongated sonic fart, and we all
laughed a bit too loudly. Unfortunately though, all great
concepts must come to an end, and veritably we quivered as
Miss Rankine buggered off to find a spot of elusive
"maturity" in drizzly old Seattle.
However, hooking up with some dodgy, old, industrial
doom-merchants (ex-Ministry drummer, William Rieflin, and
assorted Pigfaces) in the charmingly-named "Mommy's Cunt"
studio was not the dramatic turnabout we'd all been hoping
for, which is presumably where "Revenge..." fits into the
grand scheme of things.
But revenge for who? The remixers here (Red Snapper, Peshay,
Monkey Mafia, etc) are exactly the sort of people who would
have run a mile from Silverfish's initial disturbances,
which is presumably why they have turned this album into one
enormous (70-minute), Sunday morning, drum'n'bass
mungfest.
For probably the first time, Rankine finds herself chillin'
out amidst lilting acoustic guitars, and some good
old-fashioned, post-Goldie soundscapes. Add some spacious
trip-hop beats courtesy of the "indie pop" contingent
(Primal Scream and Tim Brown from the Boo Radleys), and
you've come an awfully long way from those 30-second noise
squalls of yesteryear.
As for revenge? Well, if nothing else, this devilishly
expansive remix project certainly proves that she who laughs
last, laughs longest.
James Oldham
NME
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