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Robert W. Cohen — Baseball’s Hall of Fame or Hall of Shame?

Monday, June 29, 2009 § Justin Cober-Lake

hall-of-fameIt’s important to recognize the author’s project before criticizing him for doing something he isn’t intending to do; it’s also okay to wonder about the advisability of that project. Robert W. Cohen’s Baseball’s Hall of Fame or Hall of Shame? should have revealed itself by title and cover art, but I didn’t get it until I read Cardoza Publishing’s self-description as a publisher of “easy-to-read books on gaming and sports information”.

So let’s keep in mind that Cohen’s writing for a general audience here, and if he’s not using the statistics that make Steve Lyons sick, that’s fine. Cohen’s project is a worthy one. He gives a quick overview of the history of the Hall of Fame (including its flawed voting systems) and examines every player currently enshrined.

He draws heavily on Bill James’s Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame to set up his analysis, and it’s a tack that’s both good and bad. Good, in that James’s work is impressive; the history is insightful and the arguments well-constructed. Furthermore, the book’s 15 years old, meaning that we’ve got a number of new players, as well as new tools to consider them. It’s a bad tack, though, in that it’s hard to beat James at his own game, and much of this book falls short of James’s work.

And while I approve of Cohen’s choice in staying away from anything too SABR-heavy for this intro-level work, it’s odd that he doesn’t use any tools more sophisticated than he does. Both The Hardball Times and Baseball Think Factory’s Hall of Merit (to mention just two free web sites) offer plenty of new thoughts and statistical tools that are readily accessible and easily understood. Cohen seems to be ignoring much of the conversation of recent years, listing no print text in his bibliography newer than 2002.

The most serious problem, though, isn’t so much Cohen’s avoidance of recent work on the topic or even his choice of statistical tools (James, in fact, sticks primarily to basics like batting average, home runs, etc. for that portion of the debate.). The problem is Cohen’s use of the statistics.
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Some New Old Creedence

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 § Justin Cober-Lake

Fantasy Records has just released a couple Creedence Clearwater Revival records. There’s not much that needs to be said about the band itself, and I’m not going to waste your time coming up with new ways to say “swamp rock,” etc. There is the question, though, of how much CCR you need, and in what format.

(Somewhat-sidestory: When I was a high school senior, my mom and I listened to Creedence, as a group we could agree on, on a drive home from a college visit. I was in this phase where the group had worn on me — everyone owned Chronicle, everyone played it, and everyone loved it. But that shouldn’t be held against the band. I said to my mom that all their songs sounded the same. My mom, misunderstanding my point, replied, “They do have a unique sound, don’t they?” I puzzled over this issue for some time. Eventually I returned to the opinion that they’re a pretty great band, even if the compilations are overplayed in high school circles. Real fans own and know Chronicle, Vol. 2.)

31188_01_CCR_Book.qxd:-The first disc, Creedence Clearwater Revival Covers the Classics is a strange little compilation, for the simple reason that there’s no clear target audience. The music remains mostly unassailable (especially when CCR bends the songs to their aesthetic, rather than the other way around, meaning that the songs that sound alike are better), but that point’s largely irrelevant. The record contains twelve cover versions, all previously released, and many quite well known. The casual fan will have three of the best of these on Chronicle. The next step from that comp is likely Vol. 2, which contains another seven of these covers.

That makes the target audience someone who liked those two records well enough to buy something with only two new songs on it (”Ooby Dooby” and “Ninety-Nine and a Half”, neither of which are essential), especially unlikely that the former was originally released on Cosmo’s Factory, the studio album that, I suspect, shows up most frequently in collections and has certainly been the biggest seller.

None of which makes this a bad set. It’s a compelling idea, and I’d love to see this done for more bands. The sounds good here, and the liner notes are succinct but acceptable. What would really have made this a draw would have been the inclusion of live versions, unreleased tracks, etc. (and not the single edits of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” and “Susie Q”). In the end, this one’s a very fun listen, but an oddity. It lists like a completists-only gig (for those unwilling to mix tracks they already own) and yet the music is top-rate and likely enjoyable for a wider audience.

31182_01_CCR_Roll8.qxd:-The other new CD, a true reissue, is 1980’s The Concert, which has been out a few times under several names. This one’s a little strange, too, in that, other than cashing in on the 40th Anniversary series (without adding any bonus tracks), there doesn’t seem to be much need to re-release a record that had already been re-released and remastered in several times, including in SACD in 2003. I don’t have an earlier version to compare it to, but the sound is quite good for 1970 live recording, so I’ll grant that there may be an improvement in that regard.

Oddly for a live release, there’s not a whole lot of change between the studio and the stage for most of these cuts. Even so, it’s a high-energy performance. The liner notes take pains to compare Creedence’s brevity with the era’s jammy excesses, and the band shows here why blasting through great songs in short form can make for an effective live show.

The thing I really dig about this concert, though, is the song sequence. The band opens with the single-note guitar line of “Born on the Bayou”, a riff (and a track) that perfectly set the tone for the show, and that rock enough to get things off the ground, but also stick enough in a groove to not be an early peak. Using 12 originals (and the somewhat unlikely covers of “The Midnight Special” and “The Night Time Is the Right Time”), the disc is practically a greatest hits show; given the burst of recorded output the band had produced over the last year and a half, there was no need to highlight and album.

I suppose the strong collection of songs makes the set list easier to organize, but the band does something a little surprising to close out the show. The two covers come back to back, and the band rebounds with one of its biggest singles, “Down on the Corner”. To close, though, they pick an album cut that — while classic — wouldn’t have been as well known as many of their numbers.

The crowd responds favorably to the announcement that “Keep on Chooglin’” is coming next. It’s a perfect choice, a nine-minute jam that shows off some guitar work and pounds away at the audience, making a perfect bookend with “Born on the Bayou” (both off Bayou Country, not one of their most successful albums, making another reason I like the set list and am pleased with its effectiveness).

Good enough to make you not care about why it’s been released again. Give it to a high school kid. Tell him to give Chronicle a rest.

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Blitz X; Or, Why I Stayed Up All Night THIS Time.

Sunday, June 14, 2009 § Matt Cibula

Ten years ago this summer, a bunch of us reprobates gathered to participate in the first year of what was then called Project Blitzkrieg. In this awesome event, writers are given play titles at 8 p.m. and told they have until 6 a.m. to finish a short play. That morning, directors cast the plays and then work all day with the actors — curtain rises at 8 p.m., 24 hours after they were started.

That first year, we didn’t know what we were doing; we were also loud and drank a lot of beer (and coffee) (and beer). Nowadays, people in general seem more confident and get down to work with a rather brutal efficiency. But one main thing remains the same: at 2:30 a.m., it’s just you against the clock. Which is kind of awesome and amazing.

I had a lot of fun doing the Blitz this year, met a lot of great new writers, etc. But actually seeing the plays being performed was, as always, even better than writing them in the first place, and we drank and laughed for hours after the last curtain. One of the best nights of my life, actually, thanks for asking.

So this year all the possible titles were taken from old and mostly obscure Malcolm MacDowell movies for some reason; I drew “Gangster No. 1″ and “Dangerous Indiscretion,” and didn’t know which one I’d pick until I was assigned “bedroom farce” as my genre. After the jump, you can read “Dangerous Indiscretion” if’n you want. I hope you like reading it as much as I liked writing it, but be kind — remember that I did the whole thing in one night. (It’s about 20 pages but it played out at exactly 12 minutes JUST LIKE I THOUGHT IT WOULD.) Okay bye.

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I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed

Thursday, June 4, 2009 § Justin Cober-Lake
I'm Perfect, You're Doomed

I'm Perfect, You're Doomed

Kyria Abrahams’ memoir I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed: Tales from a Jehovah’s Witness Upbringing deals with domestic violence, adultery, alcoholism, cutting, and religious oppression. It’s also the funniest book I’ve read in a long time.

That humor carries the first half of the book, which reads almost like a litany of Jehovah’s Witness ridiculousness. Abrahams works as a stand-up comic, and it’s easy to think that much of this has been adapted from (or could be easily adapted to) her routine. The narrative voice works well here — the adult Abrahams knows enough to deliver the stories wryly, but she maintains the childhood goggles of innocence.

While Abrahams’ comments on her strict upbringing are often hilarious, they also resist any attempt at a deeper look at her JH experiences. It may be a side note to the central story (one of an erratic and messy attempt at self-liberation), but Abrahams bypasses deeper thoughts on the why questions about JH worldviews. When she acknowledges that the Snorks were safe while the Smurfs were evil, she misses an opportunity to dig into the culture.

The book’s about digging out of that culture, so maybe it’s not a fair criticism; we shouldn’t fault a memoir for not being an exposé or a religious treatise. Even so, I get the feeling that the steady roll of humor here keeps us from an even more fascinating look at life in this culture.

There’s a fairly sudden shift midway through the book. The narrative tone doesn’t change, but we radically move from the tale of naive youth to one of an almost nightmarish adolescence. It’s jarring, and perhaps it should be; as a reflection on a proscribed childhood’s role in emotional dysfunction and adult trauma, it’s an effective moment of form meeting function.

From that point, the book loses the feel of a stand-up routine (Abrahams is still funny, but there’s an edge to things now that makes some of the humor feel either forced or perfunctory) but catches the speed of a well-told story. Her early adulthood is full of bizarre behavior and unlikely twists (some of which simply reveal our innate ability to repeat our errors).

Abrahams remains forthcoming throughout the book, and her avoidance of self-analysis is both a positive and negative. While she avoids over-dramatizing her experiences, she sometimes shies away too much from the emotional content. In a book where none of the what is held back, it’s surprising that — as with the JH culture in the first half of the book– there’s a lack of digging.

Ultimately, though, it’s still a rewarding read. Abrahams’ steady look at a troubling life provides more than just a voyeuristic pleasure. It’s a revelation (so to speak) on a particular culture and particular strictures that proves useful in more general terms.

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Techno Relics: Autechre, “Live @ Flex, Vienna, 1996/02/15″

Friday, May 29, 2009 § Barry Bruner

I’m going to do something a little different over my next two posts before I return to writing about the rare, weird, and ridiculous.

autechre-2007

What is this?? It’s a live Autechre recording from early 1996, a few months after the release of their third album “Tri Repetae”. Although Autechre have been widely bootlegged from about 2001 onward, tracking down live recordings from the 1990’s is virtually impossible. I won’t speak for other cities, but seeing Autechre in Toronto in those years usually involved a 3AM performance at some warehouse party held in a remote location. In other words, these weren’t exactly the kinds of events where quality soundboard recordings were likely to be made. It was only much later on in their career that they started organizing more conventional tours (and in more conventional live venues). In particular, shows from the “Confield” era can be tracked down fairly easily — and I urge you all to invest some time in that because OH BOY did that album and tour turn out to be hugely underrated with the benefit of hindsight. You just have to marvel at bootleg after bootleg of stunned crowds made up of college kids who had just discovered IDM the previous year and who thought that “Kid A” was the most out-there shit of all time, getting pulverized by machine gun rhythms and blizzards of digitized squawk that bore little resemblance to Autechre’s albums. But maybe that’s a post for another time.

There are no cohesive, recognizable songs here either, but various elements of “Tri Repetae” (albeit broken down and reassembled into vastly different shapes and permutations) will stand out for anyone who is familiar with that album. I saw them perform one month after this recording was made, and at the time, I wasn’t sure what to expect from their live set, so I crawled out of that silver foil-draped warehouse (seriously, the insides must have been decorated by the same people who designed the set for the video of A Flock Of Seagulls’ “I Ran”) having not really caught what Autechre were pitching.

Why did I buy it? This recording has been making the rounds on various message boards for a few years, I found it here. A CD-R recording does exist surprisingly enough, but I have no idea what the backstory is behind that, although I’d assume that it is a years-old bootleg release that’s become obsolete in the file sharing era.

Best Tracks? This is presented as a single hour long track, and my favourite part happens from approximately 7:30 - 15:30. At the time, I had no way to contextualize what they were doing, but having finally heard all this again, years and years later, it’s now clear that they were extracting the sound elements from “Tri Repetae”, but assembling them in the style of “Chiastic Slide” (which wasn’t released until 1997). It’s an awe-inspiring hour of brutal, shapeshifting, pounding minimalism, usually backed by a 4/4 time signature but with rhythms unconventional enough to inhibit dancing in the feet of anyone who isn’t paying close attention.

Worst tracks? The last fifteen minutes are probably the weakest, and oddly enough, this is the part that sticks most closely to their studio recordings (the melodies from “Eutow” stand out fairly clearly.)

Worth a listen? Never mind “worth a listen”, this is “essential listening”. It’s simply remarkable to catch Autechre in transition from the isolationist, abstract style of “Tri Repetae”, and moving toward the tougher, rhythmically complex styles of “Chiastic Slide”, and even foreshadowing the free-for-all approach they’d adopt five years later on “Confield”.

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With the Quickness: Last Dregs of May Edition; Featuring, an Humble Apology.

Friday, May 29, 2009 § Matt Cibula

If you are a publicist or an artist who has sent me your CD(s) and I have not reviewed them yet: I am sorry. I will get to everything eventually, I just have had to make a lot of money first. But now it’s early in the morning during one of the best weeks of my grown-up life and I’m waiting for the laundry to be done so I can put in more laundry and I thought, “Hey, self, WRITE SOME DAMNED REVIEWS ALREADY JEEZ.”

Nebula, Heavy Psych: They often sound underwater and they are okay at mimicking lots of old-school Pink Floyd and/or The Three O’Clock and/or Moby Grape. But what is even more important to me is that they actually have melodies and hooks and ripping guitar lines (”Aphrodite” is about as savage as an old garage band buried alive together on fire and grooving with a pict). Something to listen to when you aren’t desperate for “originality” or “authenticity” or “soul” or any other such outmoded concepts.

Prince, Lotusflow3r: Nowhere near as boring or irrelevant as anyone says it is, or didn’t say because they were busy dismissing it. Why all the “oh we are so bored with Prince” posturing? He is simply one of the great musicians of our lifetimes, and we need to pay attention to him. There is hardcore riffage happening all over “Boom” and lovely folky filigree all over the (slightly boring) “77 Beverly Park” and monster Hendrix funk leaking out from every corner of “Dreamer,” all the stuff we might demand if it wasn’t there…but it is! And no one is talking about it! Could it be because this was only sold at Target? Or is everyone as skeeved out by the Puritanical lecture that is “Colonized Mind” as I am? Yeah, like I need to be lectured on MY closed-mindedness by the guy behind the anti-semitic bullshit that was The Rainbow Children? Yuck, and Double Yuck for making me into a hypocrite for still liking him in spite of that and his recent “ew gay people are icky” interviews. HOWEVER: This album is not his interviews, and that track aside, I am pretty charmed by this disc. It’s fine, it’s good, it’s not the biggest or the best but it’s fine. Also, “Crimson and Clover” is still adorable. I will review MLPSoUND separately somewhere because it is a different record. Also, Bria Valente’s record isn’t horrible and there is some weird gender stuff coming into play there. Hmmmm.

Eddi Reader, Love Is the Way: Damn can that Scottish girl SANG. She’s a folkie all right, but one with a versatile sexy voice and a not-inconsiderable talent for writing; “Dandelion” sounds like a classic, “Roses” would be top 10 country if I had my way, and “New York City” gets along on specificity and vulnerability. If you love big fat beats, you will soon get bored — if you love beauty and grace, this might be your new tattoo.

Evolution Dejavu, Evolution: Czech world-music pop, hyper and overstuffed and hilariously fun in many places. Opener “Buraka” uses trance beats and a fake didgeridoo to launch us onto the dancefloor, making it on adrenaline and novelty; “Jum Kesilim” has more weirdly pretty vocal arrangements than on any Grizzly Bear record; “HIS A LLAH” is some pretty tough rai,  except when it’s countryskiffle. Like it so far, not sure how it will bear up under multiple plays.

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Meg & Dia, Here, Here and Here

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 § Matt Cibula

herehereandhere

O, plucky Frampton sisters with your folksy Utah-but-not-really emo leanings and Jessica Alba looks and way-overthumbed thesauri!

Your gentle ringing harmonies captivate, your sensitive sincerity beguiles, your melodies stick in the mind!

So what if most musical critics disdain you? Musical critics disdain everyone in your genre! It is of no importance! Pay no attention to it! Be like Say Anything and make fun of it! Be like Gym Class Heroes f/Busta Rhymes and give them all the peace sign with the index down! Or not! Do what you want and the devil take the hindmost!

There are themes on your record that disturb me, like the continuing one about how dudes are pressuring one or both of you to marry. Are these the same dudes that say “I am your umbrella, Megan”? Ew, sick-making. Do not marry these hopeless slackers, Megan and/or Dia! They are naught compared with your mighty sororital midnight power! Plus their bands ain’t got no hooks and you two got hooks! Plus your Filipino-Canadian guitarist is really good!

You are brave souls to do power-pop in the current world of music; you’d be better off to be r&b sirens or lo-fi indie mumbleteers. But you aren’t, you are yourselves, you are relentlessly and adorably pretentious, you title your albums after Mozart quotes and you give pop songs Yes-like titles like “Are There Giants Too, in the Dance”! If you change that you will be lost, Dia and/or Megan, so cleave tightly to your own vision of the future and don’t let stick-in-the-mud critics and boyfriends and haterators try to bully you into doing something else!

I bought your album for $8.99 at Target! I love it in spite of or rather because of its awkward moments and its obsessive need to be loved! And this has nothing at all to do with the fact that I just ate about a third of a bag of M&M’s!

I like you when you’re snotty (”Last Great Star in Hollywood”) and I like you when you suck up (”Kiss You Goodnight”) and I like you when you bust up a duet out of nowhere (”Bored of Your Love” with Tom of Plain White T’s) and I like you when you are just twee as hell and you don’t really want to be because you want to be edgy but at heart you’re still good girls who give a damn (all other songs).

O Meg! O Dia! You’re kind of too good to be true, but you are the future. You will always have a friend here in the Cave.

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With the Quickness: JCL Edition

Wednesday, May 13, 2009 § Justin Cober-Lake

It’s been just one of those months for a few months now, so I’m going to be trying to rapidly get caught up talking about some of my favorite music I’ve found this year (all getting shortlisted for top 10 consideration). Here’s a trio of more or less unrelated acts for you (although I guess they could all go under the rubric of “songwriter”:

With his new album Romanian Names, John Vanderslice shifts his sound, not drastically but enough that it’s noteworthy. He’s brightened the tone a little, especially on the first half of the album. In an interview a few years back, Vanderslice summed up his approach to studio work as “Make it beautiful and trash it.” There’s much less trashing here, but the attention to detail remains. The brightness works well in juxtaposition to the sometimes dark moments of the album, the hints of violence, depression, or romantic indiscretions (”your pixelated, bloody face” might be my favorite phrase, largely due to its self-allusiveness, but also assuming there’s a clever pun happening). What he’s done is to make a gorgeous record that isn’t quite lovely and a troubled record that won’t bring you down, encouraging the “still wide-eyed you” that recovers from Romanian balance beam falls. I’m going to need plenty more listens to dig into these lyrics before I rank it in JV’s canon, but it’ll compete well.

On Ghost Notes, Matthew Barber’s trick is writing these melodies that sound familiar on first listen without being cliché (there may be a trend to what I like). I keep wanting to compare Barber to Rhett Miller, but that probably has more to do with my continual listening to the new Miller disc (more that in weeks to come) than with it actually being a fitting comparison. At any rate, the RIYL probably still applies. My favorite cut here’s probably “One Little Piece of My Love,” which feels like all sorts of happy pop songs (some that have been advertising staples) but has one key difference: it’s a song about keeping a little of yourself for yourself. It’s not a selfish or frightened cut; it’s a confident one. Barber does confidence well. He’s strong throughout on this record, but never smug. But maybe I’m late to this one. While it’s new to the US, the rest of the world’s been on the original Canadian release of this record last year (which was nominated for a Juno).

I doubt that it’s often happened that an album as good as the Traditionist’s Season to Season has started off as slowly as this one. If you take a listen to this one, trust me as the opener plays, because it picks up. Joey Barro — the force behind this project — doesn’t deviate too much from country-influenced West Coast pop, and he’s at his best when he’s straightforward. If you dig up a track online, it’ll likely be “Driftwood Doll”, which is a good representation of the Traditionist’s mid-tempo side. The real find here is “Satchel Paige”, and earworm of a song that’s the best baseball cut I’ve heard in years. It comes 3/4 of the way through the record, which is a perfect spot in the sequence, letting the album peak late and carrying it home.

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Gomez, A New Tide.

Sunday, May 3, 2009 § Matt Cibula

gomez

No more whining about how none of the cool kids likes Gomez; not really in touch with any of those guys anymore anyway. Free to just free-associate about this weird bunch of unfashionable Brits whom I love. Got all the albums, done backflips over them, reviewed them with crazy over the top raves on other sites, suffice it to say that they are one of my fave current bands b/c they are smart and interesting and unusual, and this is their new one and I like it but I haven’t written about it because I haven’t written about anything for a long time, nobody’s fault but mine but here is my little Gomez A New Tide review in little snippets as that is how I am feeling these days.

  1. CD booklet shows them having coffee in a tiny Chicago diner (773 area code visible on side of truck and everything), very appropriate, they’re more US than UK these days no matter where they live.
  2. Lots more acoustic folk here to go with the indie rock and the blues structures; not much with the big fat powerchords that they were doing even as recently as How We Operate. I do not favor the folk scene much or the indie rock but I like some of it and love Gomez very much so breaks are indeed being handed out unfairly, deal with it.
  3. They were adorable on Jimmy Fallon doing “Airstream Driver.”
  4. Ben and Ian are the strangest one-two (two-one?) punch in music, the hurricane and the zephyr, the standoffish genius and the endearing spaz, Chuck D & Flavor Flav. Tom seems to be kind of just off in his own keyboard area these days but I have never been able to tell the vocal diff between Ian and Tom so I’ll stipulate that I might be wrong. (Anyone? Does anyone really care?)
  5. Olly Peacock is a great drummer, actually, and proves it on “Sunset Gates,” closest thing here to an epic track. (Some free-jazz sax towards the end too, pretty funky stuff.
  6. Listening to it now in a hotel room away from everyone I love, on the broken headphones of my miraculously resurrected iPod, might not be getting all the subtlety of the stereo imaging.
  7. “Little Pieces” continues in the fine Gomez tradition of having at least one song on every record about how Ben Just Isn’t Going to Reveal His Deep Emotional Inner Self. These songs are always addressed to a young lady but they are always meant for us. Most Brechtian band of our time? (Or would that be the Roots?)
  8. More of this theme, kinda, on “Very Strange” — best thing about this song is its probably unconscious channeling of Bob Uecker’s home run call for the Milwaukee Brewers: “Get up, get up, get out!”
  9. Some lovely use of psychedelia on “Win Park Slope.” God I miss living there. People I ran into on the street there: Steve Buscemi, Chris Rock, Neneh Cherry, some others I can’t remember. My boy Chris H. often saw Andrea Dworkin shopping at D’Agostino’s on 7th Avenue.
  10. Not sure if Gomez is “too smart” but they are certainly not dumb and don’t do a good job of sounding coolly dumb and accessible. Bands like this will never be big outside their cult. That’s okay, as the cult is growing thanks to the group’s favorage among enthusiasts of “jam band music” ugh. (The enthusiasts, not the musicians themselves.) But still.
  11. Not good driving music, a bit somnolent. Great music to listen to in one headphone when you’re lonely and bored on a Sunday in the Midwest and you’re missing your family and you’re re-evaluating your life and not liking who you’ve become but kind of have a vision of who you want to be and it’s so close you can touch it but you are going to have to work a lot harder to get there but you have to get there because if you don’t you will DIE INSIDE and that just ain’t gonna happen.
  12. Yeah, that kind of record.
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Techno Relics: “Megabass” (The Ultimate Megamix of the Hottest Club Hits), Telstar (1990)

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 § Barry Bruner

megabass_cover

Why did I buy it? Did somebody say something about a late-80’s/early-90’s Turing test? Do you remember the days when at least three or four minor dance hits automatically triggered the need for a megamix of that band’s songs? Do you remember, around 1988-90, the seemingly ubiquitous style of megamix that featured an armload of hits from different artists, all piled them up into an epic dance hit stew? If so, then you were a sentient being who was actually there at the time.

I really miss this stuff. I miss this era of commercial dance, I miss radio-friendly house, I miss the golden days of hip-house. I miss these kinds of megamixes, which were arguably the precursor of mashup/bootleg culture.

Best tracks? The “Time to Make the Floor Burn” mix lives up to its name by packing in monster jams like “Street Tuff”, “I’ll House You”, and “Ride on Time” … and that’s all in the first minute and a half! It’s a seamless mix too, perfectly blended without any cheating (e.g. annoying scratch edits, backspin-cut sequences, etc.). Oh, and that scraping noise you hear? Yeah, those are my fingernails, and they’re just scratching the surface because this mix rocks bells for another ten furious minutes.

Worst tracks? The second track, the “Get Down to the Funky Beat” mix, is a bit of a slow burner with a gradual build that eventually leads to slammers like Chill Rob G’s “The Power” and OMG mind = blown, it’s Leila K’s “Got to Get”, which I haven’t heard in nearly 20 years! Yep, this slice of awesomeness really is the worst bit of the compilation.

Worth a listen? As much as I love almost every second of this 45-minute joyride and wouldn’t mind spending the rest of the day blasting this music while shaking my groove thing in various rooms, hallways, and driveways all over town, this recommendation comes with a catch. Your mileage may vary with this music for a bunch of reasons. People who didn’t grow up with these tunes won’t know many of them, and in that case, the megamix format definitely isn’t the best way to be exposed to a handful of new songs. Some might consider the ADD-stricken megamix style to be annoying in and of itself. Others might find the production to be cheap, primitive, and sloppy. Plenty of music prides itself on sounding like that (e.g. punk, indie rock) so that’s not a criticism, just a potential viewpoint.

In the same way that they talk about how “Saturday Night Fever” and “Rumours” were what happened in the US (and Canada) instead of punk, well, the music on “Megabass” were what happened to me instead of Guns ‘n’ Roses and most classic 1980’s hip-hop. Once upon a time, I opened my ears to what was happening in clubland and it was all thanks to these tracks, so without “Megabass”, it’s possible that techno (and “techno relics”!) wouldn’t be part of my music-listening life. You can throw away your pictures and home videos, because few memories from those years are stronger, more vivid, or more positive than the serotonin-induced kaleidoscopes that form in my mind when I hear this music. So if you’re not me, or someone like me who grew up on this stuff, then give it a listen if you want to hear the sounds that rattled around our teenage brains.

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