Label: Jet Set Records
Category: Music
Average customer rating:
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1
UPC: 604978004321
EAN: 0604978004321
ASIN: B000069B0K
Release Date: 2002-07-09
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Artist: Death by Chocolate
Label: Jet Set Records Category: Music Average customer rating:
Media: Audio CD Number Of Discs: 1 UPC: 604978004321 EAN: 0604978004321 ASIN: B000069B0K Release Date: 2002-07-09 |
Zap the World
General
| Alternative Rock
| Styles
| Music
Indie Rock
| Indie & Lo-Fi
| Alternative Rock
| Styles
| Music
General
| Indie & Lo-Fi
| Alternative Rock
| Styles
| Music
General
| Rock
| Styles
| Music
Pop Rock
| Pop
| Styles
| Music
Tracks:
Similar Items:
Customer Reviews:
Zap this!.......2006-03-22
Death By Chocolate. 60's kisch meets poetry.......2004-06-13
Swinging pop with a surreal '60s edge.......2002-10-31
The album opens with a cover of a 1967 Electric Prunes' ad for the Vox wah-wah pedal ("you can even make your guitar sound like a sitar!"), cannily inserting "Death by Chocolate" into the product's list of endorsers. The line between collage and collagist is similarly blurred by Tillett's recitation of her swinging-single shopping list to a groovy discothèque backing. Other '60s touchstones include a beat stopping refrain drawn from Dudley Moore's "Bedazzled" dialogue ("'ere, my ice lolly just melted"), an H.R. Pufnstuf song (Witchiepoo's "Zap the World") recast as a capella harmony and jazz odyssey, and a pair of titles from the British film "Smashing Time."
Tillett runs through a Seussian alphabet to Ray Manzarek-like accompaniment, and pays tribute to her favorite car (Bentley Corniche), shirt (lime green fitted blouse), art (the Op art works of Bridget Riley), and cereal (Cinnamon Grahams) with short spoken pieces. The words are fanciful, the melodies effervescent, and the result is as seductive as candy.
Nostalgia gets a noogie........2002-07-11
Angie Tillet knows her way around the 60's. As her picture in the liner notes proves, even her slightly bad skin is chic in a Swinging London way, the kind of oatmeally complexion you can only get from a lifetime of bangers-and-sausage for breakfast -- she could be the young Malcolm McDowell's spunky little sister. Her debut album as Death by Chocolate was a cataloguing and recataloguing of her obsessions with the pop detritus of a decade that she and most of her listeners never saw. For me it was an all-too-precious jaunt down memory lane, like St. Etienne with irritating Cockney vocalise instead of tunes.
Zap the World is something else entirely. Not that there are more and better songs here -- only the sarcastic and anthemic "While I'm Still Young," ( "I would cry / If I died" ) which is worth the price of the album alone, qualifies as a song at all. The rest are driblets of spoken-word, unsatisfying fragments and paisley instrumentals that repeat themselves far past the point where the joke is funny. But Tillett, who is reading a tea-stained book called "Pop Art" in one of her pictures, has really expanded the possibilities for what a pop album can be. This is a full-on deconstruction of pop: its short-lived fashionability, cheap immediate gratification, and essential interchangeability even as each trendy new group pretends to be the culmination of all music -- all of these nasty truths about this scourge and godsend that has replaced Beethoven, POP, are brilliantly and subtly rendered by our precocious guide. Can you imagine a 22-year old mocking our fixation with youth instead of selling herself on it? That is the true meaning of "precocious."
The very first track, a fake ad for a "Vox Wah Wah Pedal," cruelly strips down the cliches of the Beatles and their peers ( "You can even make your guitar sound like a sitar!" ) until there is nothing left but a hank of hair and teeth. And all in about thirty seconds. Later she describes a hideous "lime-green blouse with fitted collar and puce cuffs," at which point we hear a record being lifted off the needle and her chirpy voice admonishing, "You don't have to WEAR all this -- all you have to do is listen!" Then we get the musical equivalent of that shirt, a foul lounge-y nightmare that sounds like your grandma's wallpaper looks. Tillett's affection for the 60's has entirely evaporated -- this entire album is a morbid joke at the expense of a generation who thought they would never get old and then did. The only way it could be any meaner is if she included a song about Paul McCartney's jowls.
Yet there is a moral aspect here as well. This album will be forever linked in my mind with Roman Coppola's film CQ, another superficially superficial examination of our inability to ever be happy where we are, in the present moment. Coppola shows the 60's as a decade where everyone dreamt of the glorious and utopian future, whereas those long-dead dreams now seem to us, stuck in the REAL future, this simulcra-plagued and pornographic age, as our last respite. If this album is not as fully-realized as the movie -- Tillett has yet to make her defining album -- they both remind us that there is no going back, that nostalgia is only a mass delusion that will weaken us and lead to disaster.
Music Album:
Music CD
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