A true return to top form
Anthony W. Agee | Kansas city, MO USA | 07/09/2009
(4 out of 5 stars)
"The trajectory of popular musicians is usually dramatically front-loaded much like a roller coaster: the first few drops are the ones that really keep us coming back. The longer the coaster goes, the less dramatic the drops, the slower the speed, and everything seems to become just more of the same and expected...even hackneyed.
Ed Rush and Optical followed this familiar path for years after their groundbreaking album, Wormhole (1998). They released some solid music (The Creeps, 2000) and some not-so-wonderful (The Original Dr. Shade, 2003), but none of it really giving fans any indication that Ed Rush and Optical were heading anywhere except down the same well-traveled coaster tracks.
Well, the boys from Virus have jumped the track.
Something that is truly, exceptionally rare is to find veteran musicians who are not only willing to revisit older styles but also make that music sound just as energetic and dangerous as it sounded nearly a decade ago - without making it sound like fan service, without making it sound desperate and greedy and self-referential.
Travel the Galaxy is so much damn fun. So many familiar sounds are resurrected here, the gritty electric guitar samples, the eerie soaring synths, and the buzzsaw basslines that put Ed Rush and Optical on the map. And I'll be damned, but they all sound so good...and fresh. In a time where some of the Drum and Bass greats have turned into spineless, tired versions of their former selves (COUGHDillinjaCOUGH) it is so refreshing to see truly talented artists do what we have wanted them to do: take a huge deep breath and shake the dust off of themselves.
I'll spare you the track-by-track analysis, the samples here will speak for themselves. The production and mastering are mind-blowing, listen to how far things have come since Wormhole. There truly isn't a weak track on this album."
Track Listings (12) - Disc #1