A strange notion, but as The Verve bow out, at least part of their eulogy is made up by the music that used to herald their onstage arrival. An hypnotic veil of strings, a grooving bass riff, and then the spectral and majestic voice singing, “There is no God but you…”
[a]David Axelrod[/a] was the man responsible for the aforesaid epiphanic ‘Holy Are You’ by The Electric Prunes, and this collection gathers together more miracles of transformation as performed by him, plus hitherto obscure tracks by the producer himself. His style a strange mix of full orchestra and cocktail lounge, he implicitly pushed a funky spirituality. If strings could be this big, he implied… well, how big was God?
Whacked-out on the same kind of lofty notions that preoccupy the likes of Pierce and Ashcroft (like the latter, he used William Blake‘s poetry as a starting point), not to mention slowly cooking in a great deal of drugs, this is genuinely massive and moving music. Periodically sounding like a B Minor Mass for [I]Starsky And Hutch[/I], huge Axelrod originals like ‘The Fly’ show that, nonetheless, the man really was not mucking about.
Thematically the cousin of DJ Shadow (Axelrod mixed ‘Rabbit In Your Headlights’ on the UNKLE album), Ennio Morricone and Curtis Mayfield, Axelrod was after exalting God, on drugs, and mostly managed it. As such, these really are urban hymns.