the telling moment for me on the last nothing people record was the cover of syd barrett’s late night. he said, inside me i feel alone and unreal. and this, this whole enterprise, drenched in the pessimism, gloom and amphetamine-cranked paranoia of kurt vonnegut and philip k. dick, this is what informs nothing people’s sci-fi bent.

and soft crash, good god. was expecting something special from them (i always do) but nothing prepared me for just how dirty magnificent, how unshiny glorious, how absofuckinglutely belting this record is. each new side heads down another slightly skewed path. the way it should be.

aye.

i mention dick and vonnegut. what i’m gonna take from this forty minute excursion is that same disassociation, the transcendental of real and unreal, creator and created. consider the album as a medium. consider the mind as reality. consider good as evil. consider yrself as god. consider yrself as an actor playing a part.

where was i?

oh yeah soft crash.

everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.

said vonnegut.

man i’ll apply that exquisite phrasing here.

they’ve taken the eccentric early roxy music futuro-isms and pumped them fulla dark fug and grubby neon. lots of folk namechecked chrome (lazy me included) in comparison. not hearing this as much anymore. as creed himself said, they wanted to make scary, funny music. which in a way is what nothing people do. but this shit, this shit is much more hazy, much more organic, much more human.

i’m digging the fact this beast is so hard to pin down, wriggling electric-eel-like between my fingers everytime i have a sweaty grasp on it. it’s like the house band in a seventies j.g. ballard novel. okay no more book talk. it’s like gary war and simply saucer mindmelding. okay no more lazy comparisons. it’s like the cramps from a future past. i. said. no. more.

(though dammit satellite not found sounds like something lux and ivy might have jizzed out on some jodorowsky spaceship)

it’s that mixture of stumbling punk and monged garage rhythmandblooze and that otherworld oddball sexuality that oozed from ferry and eno. transistor radio broadcasts from a basement, someotherplace, someothertime. all cranked out on strings and skins and old organs and battalions of pedals. the pulse and throb of analogue reverberation. echo, resonate, delay. man, these fellas are transmitting from yesterday, today, tomorrow all at the same time.

dig down through the dermis of mangled pop (marilyn’s grave might just be the finest threeandabit minutes they’ve recorded) and buried beneath the murky electric viscera, deep in the wires, the jittering rubber and copper guts, lies the propulsive spasming energy of the kosmiche, the motorik. there’s just something wonderfully untoward about the drums on nothing people records that unsettles me in oh so magikal ways.

kilgore trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. they were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

not saying they’re yeast drowning in shit, but soft crash is definitely champagne. time to realise that dear readers. exceptional stuff.

myspace / ss records