Estradasphere - Quadropus
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Music CD Cover
Artist: EstradasphereEdition: Music CD
Format: Enhanced
CD Release Date: 2003-10-28
Music Label: Mimicry
Soundtracks:
- Mekapses Yitonisa - Estradasphere, Traditional
- Dubway - Estradasphere, Estradasphere
- King Krab Battle - Estradasphere, Whooley, Iron Chef
- Speck - Estradasphere, Schimmel, Jason
- Hardball - Estradasphere, Schimmel, Jason
- A Car Ride in Idealistic Ethiopia, Pt. 1 - Estradasphere, Smolens, Tim
- Crystal Blue - Estradasphere, Whooley, John
- Jungle Warfare - Estradasphere, Schimmel, Jason
- Bodyslam - Estradasphere, Estradasphere
- At Least We'd Have Today - Estradasphere, Smolens, Tim
Free Music Notes for Quadropus
Free Music Review: Potpourri for $400, please? (3.5 stars)
Hit: 3 Stars
It looks like an intriguing idea on paper: a wide-ranging batch of electic songs and styles that you'd normally have to make your own mix-CD to hear, except that it all comes from one band. Estradasphere is an unquestionably unique group with pretty impressive musicianship, seemingly influenced by free jazz and middle Eastern music just as much as by TV/video game themes, heavy metal and the Iron Chef. Should be a wild ride. Right?
Well.. variety is great, but the result here seems to be a mix that everyone finds something different to like in. I've played it for several people and everyone's had their picks of favorites and throwaways - and no two people's choices seem to match up. You'd probably be hard pressed to find someone who likes everything on offer here unequivocally.
So let's take a look. The trad. Greek tune "Mekapses Yitonisa" is a very promising start, sinuous and almost hypnotic despite the weird time signatures. "Dubway" is an acapella/techno groove that gets repetitive, but has a quirky charm all its own. Ditto "Jungle Warfare," except that it's a bludgeoning death-metal track complete with bone-pounding drums and goofy growls instead. "King Krab Battle" is pure cheese - but quite fun despite that - portraying the soundtrack to an epic cartoon fight with violent horns and a kind of silly grandiosity. It's what you might hear for a Japanese anime production of a Celebrity Deathmatch episode.
The hardest stretch for me to take is the "Hardball"/"A Car Ride..." segment. (They're listed as two separate tracks but might as well add up to one extended monster, as they seem like two parts of a whole.) It's certainly ambitious - a super-tight avant-prog suite tinged with polka in an almost-classical format with a generous helping of Indian influence and enough twists and turns to write a math textbook on - but I don't hear anything holding it together. Cutting from one section to the next without any transitions would work in a small dose, but 20 straight minutes of it gets old fast. There's no flow to the whole thing, just an extended series of unison shifts that seem to be there for their own sake.
I guess the generic-template factor is why Quadropus leaves me somewhat flat. "Crystal Blue" is a doowop-ish 60s throwback that recycles every Chuck Berry/Beach Boys cliche known to man, but it's *just* a bunch of cliches, nothing more. "Bodyslam" is a standard WWF rap-rock theme, but *just* a generic imitation and nothing more. It would be one thing if there was a self-parody aspect to the whole thing, but these tunes are just presented straight-faced, and the stuff they're imitating isn't funny enough to stand on its own. The same goes for "At Least We'd Have Today," which is their take on top 40 pseudo-soulful, heard-one-heard-em-all R&B ballads.
I don't know. Maybe I'm missing the joke.
At least there's no video game music, which is why I made this my first pick (and whether it's a better E-sphere intro than the others I can't say). Since my opinion seems to be different every time I listen, and since everyone seems to enjoy it differently anyway, I'll settle at 3.5 stars. It's worth some good listening for the sheer outrageousness of their wide-ranging approach - and the musical skill with which it's all pulled off - and at the very least, they deserve big points for trying. Beyond that, I guess you'll have to decide for yourself.
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