Search - Bowery Electric :: Beat

Minimalist trip-hop--throw in shoegazer

Keir H. Fogarty | fort collins, colorado United States | 04/08/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"this is Bowery Electric's best album--they have always been a blend of shoegazer/My Bloody Valentine, and trip-hop--this album has the best amalgam of the two, while their two other albums lean too far one way or another--The vocals have been called boring and monotonous by Bowery-haters, but they're missing the point--this band is about music seamlessly emerging from a background--like you could turn on the stereo and there would be no discrete moment when one would say, "ok the music's on"--the music is emergent from the ambient noises of life--this is an excellent "study" album--especially track 8 (one of my fave songs of the past few years)--"words are just noise," goes one of the opening lines of the album--you get the sense that this minimalism (see the gargantuan last track(I fall asleep to it every night))is saying something about music in general--like they don't dare to be so loud as to assume to be changing anything, but are rather taking the sounds of the world around and gently guiding them into some pattern--a gardener lets a tree be a tree, but by placing it and pruning it, can achieve a rather powerful effect--Bowery Electric aren't creating the sounds of their album, but rather channel the constant flow of sound around them."

Sparse yet lush...

Yuri Kuzyk | Toronto, Ontario Canada | 09/18/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"For some reason I pulled this out of my cd collection and once again realize how good it is. Bowery Electric sound similar to a stripped-down Slowdive, or perhaps like a minimalist trip-hop version of This Mortal Coil.Basically two people, Martha Schwendener on bass and haunting vocals with Lawrence Chandler on guitar and programming, BE seem to have a knack for noticing the slow yet powerful undercurrents of much of the electronica dance music being foisted on the public. Unlike Portishead they don't seem too concerned with making 'pretty' soundscapes which lends even more strength to the album. Schwendener's vocals are particularly beautiful since they are mixed in the back of the heavier music - but they also don't get lost in the soundscape.Worth hunting down - a number of tracks evoke the state of affairs post 9/11 from people who live(d) there..."

Urban shoegazer

eric | Redlands, Ca. United States | 11/30/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a great album. Definitly not for everyone, but definitly
worth owning. This is the album My Bloody Valentine would have made if they had survived after Loveless. It is stark, ethereal,
heavy, minimal, yet beautiful all at the same time. Some people might find it a bit heavy and perhaps even boring, but it is an
aquired taste, I think. It is better than their newer material
(Lushlife), more focused and less busy, which adds to it. I would classify this as 'urban shoegazer'"