***Updated***: Comfortable nausea (Compassion - Broadway Project)

Name: mo79

Hello doyoo user, You have to be logged in to use these functions... Login or register Close window

Send message to member

Product:	Compassion - Broadway Project
Date:	08/03/01 (70 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A cohesive and excellent dark, trippy and experimental album *** + bonus disc and new art for re-release!

Disadvantages: If you don't warm to it or aren't in the mood for it it can just sail past your ears; it demands focus

***Update***
This album was re-released earlier this year by a new (better) distributor, with new art-work and a bonus disc. Scroll to the end of this op for a bit of info on the bonus disc.
If you own an original version of the album you can send it to BP's label, Memphis Industries (postal address found @: www.memphis-industries.com), who are offering a free exchange to the re-release as a sign of good will. Even so, the album is still £12 - for 22 ace tracks!
Visit www.broadwayproject.co.uk for more info on BP, exclusive free MP3's, and how to join the BP mailing list.

I'll leave the rest of the original op as it is, intact with it's tinge of hyperbolic propagation of media myth. It makes it more interesting to read. I must add though, if you're a fan of FSOL or Aphex Twin you'd be wise to check this out for sure.***

Broadway Project is the brainchild of one Dan Berridge, an unfortunate sufferer since 1998 of chronic fatigue syndrome who has since retired to Worthing. This musical project is the result of his pains and tiredness and free time.

Purgatory often produces the most darkest and most interesting art, and Broadway Project's debut LP 'Compassion' after a few ghost singles and EP's is a perfect example of that.

Describing this record piece by piece is like describing blood by droplets. It's also hard, since each song is like a molecule, or part of a picture which forms the big piece. Isolating and disecting each piece would be a fruitless and boring exercise, infact even writing an opinion on it full stop is.
You really have to just give it a listen, all that needs saying is that it's very good. I will however to be a useful reviewer give little comments on each of the tracks a little later on.

This decent length 14 tracker combines elements of jazz, hip-hop, soul, ambience and other things that have sailed past Berridge's ears to form a kind o
f eery, at times random, at times soothing and at times twisted record. It's definetly not a heavy record, and neither is it difficult, but it is definetly very mind numbing.
It's like an old man sitting at a park bench watching kids play on swings until his eyes blur and sees the meaning of 'it all'. I'm not mad, honest!

It's a very clean and pure collection. As it's title suggests there is a lot of love in it, and truth. It's not a pop record, but it's accessible to those who are willing to warm to stuff like this.
Slight comparisons to Portishead have been made, and even modern Radiohead, but they're very vague. It's slack journalism, but it's okay for the sake of simple labelling. It's experimental and it's trippy, which is what should be correctly said at most.

The album opens and closes with the same windy metallic beating and whistles, to show it off as a kind of vague conceptual story album.

It's not without hint of comedy though as 'Born Spirit' spits out its comic 'oww's and 'ooh's' over a piece of drained jazz. There is even singing such as the digestible Macy Gray alike on 'For The One'.

'Femme Fatale' is probably the darkest song on here. It's quite scarey, indeed. It's saddenning, really. It's the strings that do it.

'Life Of A Refugee' features finger-in-water splashes and radio/TV samples of refugee speeches and stories. It's got a sense of random light chaos here.

'Non-Resistance' could possibly be the soundtrack to both life and death, while 'Plants And Leaves' is the neutral sound of European cafe culture being stirred around with it's French samples, spoon hitting cup samples and airy female vocals.

'Sea Of Change' (despite sounding like a Scorpions title?) is like riding a boat into the dream world of your head. Lovely,
yet unexpected in what you take in.

'Quiet Revolution' is the sound of capitalism being dissolving, while 'No Pain' features comic guitar stabs try and wreak havoc over the smooth laid-back jazz.

'January' features some hip-hop bass and percussion, little jangly bells and airy kind of bottle blows. I don't know what they are, but it's quite brash while being soft.

Berridge attacks while not noticably attacking the listener; he's an aural manipulator. Artists of this calibre, atleast nowadays are rare if you ask me.

'Sea Of Change Part 2' is an adequate follow-up to it's predeccessor with brittle hip-hop drums and ambience crawling and amassing around to create a mildly claustrophobic but rounded atmopshere.

'London Broken Heart' features more soulful female vocals, a hip-hop backbeat and more broken or atleast fragmented bits of jazz.

'No Religion' is a kind of happy way to end. Featuring Dan's same aforementioned trademarks with cascading piano and then wailing out like first song the frayed 'Who's To Blame' did.

Although it's a great record, it is quite different to many different things out at the moment, and so will need a tiny bit of patience from your ears and perseverence from your mind before you truly appreciate this masterpiece.

It's a great record throughout, and deserves 5 stars for being original, and then being good, and consistently to make a lovely rounded album.

I'll look forward to more Broadway Project releases and take a look at the formative singles back catalogue. I was never a big jazz fan, but when you get records like these, sometimes people like me have to beg to differ. It's just brilliant, simply.

***Bonus disc***
Accompanying the SRD re-release, apart from new art-work, is an 8-track CD featuring selected rarities from Dan Berridge's early ghos
t singles; some of which are good, some of which are brilliant that it's a crime they weren't issued more widespread in the firstplace.

'Confession' is a funky eery jazz piece with unfolding strings, chilled hip-hop beats and sparkly starry samples accompanying a sample of a telephone conversation that's mostly hard to make out.

'Crash' is my most favourite track off the bonus disc. It sounds like a brittle boned version of that track with Massive Attack and that woman from Everything But The Girl (sorry for the vagueness). It features asphyxiating cymbals and a constipated kick drum, that gives birth to some passionate and subdued Indiany-like male vocals that somehow gender-morphs by the last minute while remaining in pretty much the same key.

'Clouds' is something that would make modern Moby want to destroy the master tapes of 'Play'. Hissy vinyl crackling, an achey male blues vocal and heavy toms here and there serve as an interlude.

'Kindness' is a very weird and unsettling track. It's a beautiful piano piece with a jazz beat - and it - I don't know how did it, but the track's production actually changes the pressure of the air, to make it feel as if your ears are popping! You'll want to gulp, but it won't matter as you'll have to wait 'til the end of the track. It can be a bit queasy, but in general this physical sensation immerses you more in the dazedness of this track. I would love to know how to make ears pop, it would make a good party trick.

'Recovery' is a simple acoustic guitar piece with haunting shattered-mirror-reversing like sound effects.

'Eisenhower, Kennedy Johnson' featuring a sample featuring those names, telling the empowerment of why we bother to do outdo eachother when we're all the same, seems to have been dissected for when 'Compassion' was made, as many of the samples seem to be
available on a number of songs on the LP. This track is good, but it's dissection served as organs to the other songs better.

'I Am A Spy' sounds a bit like Radiohead's 'Dollars And Cents' with it's wouldn't-be-out-of-place-in-a-arty-pastiche-of -a-Bond-movie sounds, and not many people could get away with sampling a bit of guitar from The Professionals (I think) theme tune could they?

Final track 'The Beast' featuring a child recalling a tale of a monster alongside a soundtrack to the bent back of Notre Dame's Hunchback, is a scarey piece featuring hollow-barrelled percussion and stabbing strings.***

...All this from a man who has recently remixed such names as Garbage and Badly Drawn Boy and has drawn more attention with the release of the 'For The One E.P.' (featuring a re-recorded 'For The One' and extra tracks). BP is getting noticed more!
Eff your stupid nu-metal guitar bands, and take a look at this if you haven't already. Good record collections are aching for it! I can't wait for the new album later this year too!

Summary: