September 27, 1998

Journey To The Centre Of The Mind

On paper there's a twisted logic to it. Alan McGee signed a fairly successful indie rock band once, so he must be a pioneer carrying the drum'n'bass standard into the new millennium....

5 / 10 ON PAPER THERE'S A TWISTED LOGIC TO IT. ALAN MCGEE SIGNED A FAIRLY successful indie rock band once, so he must be a pioneer carrying the drum'n'bass standard into the new millennium. And Ed Ball is bald, so that's a bonus.

So loaded are these twilight technophiles they've hired a legion of cutting-edge remixers (Future Forces, The Guyver, Solid State) to bolster their basic compositions - an exercise, one suspects, akin to Irvine Welsh rewriting Pam Ayers. The result is essentially Al'n'Ed's journey through Electro Revolutionism For Beginners. 'Astral Dominoes' finds them plugging in their swanky new sequencer and pissing about with the percussion noises, and by the time 'Watch The Target' rounds off Lesson One they've almost got the hang of this funky and frivolous d&b malarkey.

You can't say you can ride a bike though, Al, until you've scrapped your stabilisers. We await the first solo flight of The Chemical Pilot with iron-clad ribcages.