This has become one of my all time favourite albums, it's a shame that YMO remains relatively unknown outside of Japan, despite the many various artists their work has inspired over the years.
Solid State Survivor was their second album, and IMHO their best. I'm usually not a huge fan electronic music, but YMO manages to pull it off in such a creative and original way (they had to be original, as they were among to the first, way back 25 years ago) The album is endlessly entertaining with a wide variety of instruments being used - the disco bass beats used in several songs make this a fairly funky record to listen to, although the songs are not really relevant to disco in any other way.
The style from song to song is fairly inconsistent other than that all songs are played with synths (which being 70's synths, makes it sound all the better) but that's part of what makes the album so fun to listen to. The first two songs on side 1 and the last two songs on side two are arguably the best.
Insomia is perhaps the most interesting of these songs because of the large and unlikely combination of instruments used (mostly synthed) including: mouth harp, koto, electric organ, not to mention other synth sounds and the drums and bass.
Not to take anything away from the somewhat spazzy
Absolute Ego Dance or
Solid State Survivor which is possibly the best overall song of the album, though
Technopolis is also good.
This is a hard album to describe as fitting any person's particular tastes, chances are that if you like bands such Kraftwerk, or Men Without Hats you'll probably love this album, even though it is rather different in style and sound than anything made by those two bands. I guess appropriately, the album could be fitted into the "synthpop" or "technopop" genres.
If you, like me don't even like most techno music, you might want to give this album a try anyway since it is refreshingly devoid of overly repetive songs that end up going nowhere.
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09-10-2004, 09:38 PM
