Sunday, September 24, 2006  3:00 pm 

What is the difference between ‘Music’ and ‘Dream’?

The difference is frequency (or the specific speed that energy is vibrating at) apparently; according to Ida No in her slightly scary conversation with the inquisitive but logically agnostic Robot on the intro to the new Glass Candy tour CDR ‘Music Dream’. We’re just energy perceiving energy anyways. There is no opposite to energy as there is nothing that is not energy, so whether we’re awake or dreaming our minds are just ignorant dealers in the world of signs and symbols, right? Yeah, let’s leave Ida and Robot waxing lyrical about existence like introspective Rei Ayanami from Shin Seiki Evangelion and skip to track 5:

Glass Candy - Superficial Roadblocks

‘Superficial Roadblocks’ is a cover of a track by Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come. Glass Candy inject slinky disco pizzazz and glitter-flecked 2am discotheque sex appeal into the original sermon from the mount-like prog rock wig-out.

Ida No is in full exotic vampyr ice queen wielding megaphone mode and Dusty Sparkles’ subtle dub-like Chris & Cosey drums softly thump and patter throughout. Along comes Slash of popular early 90’s rock band Guns ‘n’ Roses fame with a guitar solos finale performed outside a cliff-top chapel but its better cos its not lame Slash, its actually alien-elektro knight, Johnny Jewel, soaring off through the storm clouds on a crystaline fret board.

Glass Candy keep it at cloud level for track 7, ‘City Lites’, a throbbing, sinister midnite instrumental. ‘Superficial Roadblocks’ was the Music side and now we have the Dream side:

Glass Candy - City Lites

Energy is warped and snapped, tempered into slowly glowing neon tendrils that snake around everything, activating electronics into a new malevolent mindset. Ice shards fall onto empty blue-lit 1984 streets, empty because the criminal gangs from ‘Assault On Precinct 13′ are too nervous of the sound that is emitting from the sky. Not many bands can create these atmospherics convincingly and most of the time its not as great when Ida isn’t present, but the atmospherics of ‘City Lites’ would be tainted with anybodys vocals.

New LP ‘Life After Sundown’ in 2OO7, new 12″ (’I Always Say Yes’/'The Chameleon’) out soon and another one after that too apparently, all on Troubleman Unlimited.

If Glass Candy are touring then that must mean Chromatics are too. Their tour disc is entitled ‘In Shining Violence’, and is designed to be listened to between the midnite hour and the break of dawn, those are the rules, no messin’.

Chromatics - Shining Violence

Opener ‘Shining Violence’ used to have vocoder verse and guitar refrain in a previous CDR universe, now it is resculpted as an ice-piano and high pitched mournful synthesiser led funeral march, played over the speaker system of a grand hall in Andromeda marking the passing of Queen Promethea in ‘Galaxy Express 999′. The assembled cyborgs, androids and silvery skinned Replicants shed tears of high-grade mechanic oil as her photon-accelerated chrome bullet coffin floats serenely out of the air lock and suddenly blast forth into space, spearheading straight toward a black hole of infinite mechanised death.

Adam Miller is watching all of this from the safety of his life pod cruising in orbit around Neptune. He takes a sip of the fine wine from the vineyards of Hyperion, sits back and relaxes with nothing to worry himself, the chrome-plated sexaroids are piloting the pod. His head is filled with the sound of this:

Chromatics - The Price Of Love

A skeletal frame of a song, so minimal at times its not even there. As guitars scrabble on their rusty strings in the corner of the room, thread-bare synth wails meld with the snapping drums with the added bonus of the atmospherics of a gigantic reflective castle floating on moon beams in cold, dark, deep space. ‘The Price Of Love’ marks the stone cold sober insomniacs movements at the 4am mark of the CDR’s listening window of midnite till dawn.

LP ‘Shining Violence’ enters our solar system in 2OO7, before that a messenger in the form of a 12″ (’In The City’/'House Of Models’) both on Troubleman Unlimited, and you can get ‘Hotel’, a revised version of 2OO5’s ‘Mannequin’, on the myspace page.

USA based spectres check the myspace pages for tour dates, UK based mutants come wallow in tour-less misery along with us. Rumour has it that some dorks from some lame blog are sorting a website out for Chromatics too.

labels >> xxjfg