Metamatic Forums John Foxx John Foxx and Louis Gordon Crash & Burn & Sideways expanded quick review

I'll just cover off what's new.

The new booklets are lovely.Nice to see all of the lyrics.Nice job Rob & all.

Sideways Disc 2
Cargo 2008 Live tracks

I was there so its nice to finally hear excellent sounding versions of these tracks.Remembering that I had some HD video of quite a lot of the show with very badly distorted sound,now I can watch my videos with John & Louis (and Steve D'As) audio.

Young Savage and Dislocation sound better than I remember them.

My stand out favourite from the Cargo set is The Garden.

Haunted

Drum machine and treated Piano ambience intro lead into other wordly Foxx vocals yes we have a song.

Crash and Burn Disc 2
Labywrinth Generarator

Slow smoky ambienty instrumental.

Storm Warning

This instrumental sounds very Peter Gabriel in parts,could have come off The Last Temptation CD.

Broadway Submarine

This is quite an experimental instrumental

Nottingham 2003 Live tracks

Pretty good both of them.

One thing of note is that Invisible Women V2 is sung live over the Sex Video backing track.This confused me at first.I thought the sleeve notes were wrong.

Overall great packages,improvements over the original,worth having.

I've yet to to give the first discs a spin but I will tomorrow.

Brian

Thanks for this note Brian. Do you know, I have two or three bootlegs of this tour (not the Nottingham gig) and I never noticed that before.
Every setlist I've seen shows Invisible Women followed by Sex Video and doesn't acknowledge that this is in fact Invisible Women 2 - a completely 'new' track

Something of a rarity, so it's really good to get a version of this track out on official release.

I have none of the bootlegs from 2003 and didn't see a live show until Coventry 2006 so its new to me.

Anyway thinking about it shouldn't it be Invisible Women 3?

First was on the Nation 12 album,second on The Pleasures of Electricity.

Thanks for the review, Brian.

You gave all the information I was after while deciding whether to order the CD.

A very good point - but there is a little bit of logic in the way it's been named. As you rightly say, the first version of Invisible Women to be released (in 2001) was on The Pleasures Of Electricity. An 'earlier' version (also called Invisible Woman) appeared on the 2005 Nation 12 album Electrofear.

It wouldn't have been right to have appended the 'earlier' version of Invisible Woman (as it appeared on Electrofear) with a 2. And so to distinguish the version which appears on the new version of Crash And Burn - as it is very different to either of the other two versions - we decided that it should be appended with V2 in the same way that we had done with Car Crash Flashback on Sideways.

Rob

Cheers for the explanation Rob,it was an unexpected treat to hear it.

(Off topic aside):
Thanks for the note Rob. It's quite hazy logic...
There's two different mixes on Electrofear,and a TPOE 2009 'new' version

Imagine trying to classify these versions into some kind of archive!!**$$??
Such nonsense would be more or less Impossible

Yes, cheers for the reviews Brian. Look forward to hearing these tracks even more now.

(On my Christmas list, luv, see the sucker on the fridge door...)

Do the Cargo tracks include a bizarre half hour interlude where John says "Good night" in the middle of the set, (rushes off to backstage to the loo?), and then comes on and plays just as many songs as before he said goodnight?

Many thanks Brian!

Cheers Garry,

Currently listening to the side 1s

Sideways to me sounds louder,percussion more in your face.

The laughter at the start of And the World Slides Sideways jumped out at me.

Could just be just my rusty Klaxon bashed ears though


I swapped back and fourth between old and new using Underwater as a test track.

I'm not going to even going to use the R word but Sideways sounds clearer to me.

Anyone else had a listen to their side 1s yet?

Your ears are not deceiving you... everything on these two releases has been remastered.

Rob

Cheers Rob,I'm not going mad(yet!)

Another reason to go out & buy these releases.

I ordered both reissues from Townsend late yesterday afternoon and they arrived this morning. That's great service by anyone's standards.

Just got to find some time to listen to them now!

Remastered or remixed? Please not the latter as Sideways is one of my most listened to releases.

My original version of Sideways had a couple of annoying bits; 1) the end of X-Ray Vision increased notably in volume for the last few seconds and 2) In A Silent Way leapt out of the speakers far too quickly on start-up as if a microsecond of intro had been deleted.

Hopefully these two minor annoyances have been removed in the remastering process.

Whatever has been done to Sideways I think it sounds miles better to me.

Anyone else gotten hold of these releases yet?

On a brighter note, I had the 2 cd's in the post about 1 hour ago.
Playing Crash and Burn disc 2 now...I noticed, what sounds like a 'glitch' on the outro of Making Movies...at about 8:27-8:28
Is that meant like this?
Can someone fill me in on this?

Got my CDs through and X-Ray Vision is fixed!
Unfortunately, "In A Silent Way" still scares the crap out of me on start-up in as it leaps at the listener in a slightly ironic non-silent way, especially after the long deep droning fadeout of "Car Crash Flashback V2".

That said, I agree with Brian that the sound is vastly improved over the original release. There's a plethora of little nuances I hadn't noticed before such as the fadeout vocal harmony on X-Ray Vision. Also, the instrumentation over the vocal section of "And The World Slides Sideways" seems less harsh with some increased bass. This definitely makes for a more enjoyable listening experience.

Even if you have the previous releases AND the Drive EP, I would definitely recommend adding these deluxe editions to your collection. If you don't then no moaning in a few years when you purchase META56, and realise there's a gap right in the middle of your collection where META 27 & 28 should sit!

It's definitely not a'glitch' - it's meant to sound like that.

Rob

Thanks for clearing that up Rob!

Best regards from a snow-covered Rotterdam,
fons

Listened to cd 1 of C&B,tracks have been augmented,remixed and remastered.I like it.

In the same way TPOE and SC were?

RE-MIXED??

Any advance? Rob? Are there 'new' versions of some tracks then, like on TPOE as Alex suggests?

I take back some of my last statement although some of the track times are slightly different.

It has been so long since I last listened to C&B that it's the remastering that is making it seem so different and clearer to me.

I've just sat down with both versions.

Shows that I don't play C&B often enough

Anyways apologies for any heart attacks or confusion I've caused.

So no it's not like TPOE augmenting,I think on double checking it sounds more well defined than the version I'm used to hence my confusion.

No worries - makes perfect sense Brian. I don't have much of an ear for these kind of subtleties anyway!!
Thansk for coming back tho'.

I'd agree that C & B is also one of my least played Foxx albums. Perhaps that will change once the new edition arrives through the door.

C&B i used to skip whole tracks of the old one as I wasn't keen on some of them.

This one I will play a lot more.

Having lyrics I can read has given me a new impetus to listen to the tracks I used to skip.

Received my copies yesterday, along with The Complete Cathedral Oceans.

Enough of a temptation to actually stay in of an evening, and an excuse to scribe another bowl of pretentious twaddle

So far I have played only Crash and Burn. In headphones, the album sounds absolutely superb, even though, like Brian, it's probably not one of my bestest favourites.

It's brilliant to have the lyrics now. Even though I have long since transcribed most of them, the ending of Ray 1 / Ray 2 has remained a mystery. For obvious reasons!!
It's a really clever piece of wordplay. Lots of intriguing phrases to put into an internet search engine at some point...

Keinholtz Starlight - anyone ??

Disc 2 is exceptionally good. I've always liked The Drive EP, so its an electrical pleasure to have re-mastered versions of the extra tracks on there, especially of course the rusty, lumbering and sybaritic monster that is Underwater Dreamsex*.

*Has anyone ever tried this? Thoroughly recommended - just watch out for the submerged vehicles...

To have this indulgence followed by the post-coital irregularity of the new track Labyrinth Generator really is lighting the cigarette on the pillow. OK its intricate and confusing, but such is John Foxx at his best.
This is a real gem, and for me it's the standout of the 'new' material.
Immaculate conception guys. Placed as it is with precision and due care as a bridge between the EP tracks and the LFAR material.
Gives it additional depth and presence by adding context. Transparent faces from the old-school. Almost like someone thought about it...

Joking aside, I am really impressed by the running order of disc 2 especially.

Broadway Submarine, as Brian suggests, is the most experimental of instrumentals. It's beautiful and complex - an unquestionaly female piece of music. Richly layered, full of quirks and foibles, yet charged with a sensual energy and delicacy that successfully manages to challenge and tease simultaneously.

Weird, some would say.
And that's what makes it so refreshing.

Storm Warning comes in waves of hisses and hum. It sounds at first like rain, then swarms of wading birds above the Norfolk mudflats. Then a queue of motorway traffic passing a theremin conductor. Ominous and brooding like a tiny, coloured, movie...

Wouldn't it be fun to sweep the studio floor that holds such diamonds in the dust and dog hair?

And here's where the sequencing works so well again - the soundtrack intro to Sex Video is a revelation. Was that really there all the time??

I'd forgotten the majesty of the live From A Room tracks too, so its great to hear these again, in a slightly different context. I can now hear echoes of Dance With Me in Broken Furniture.

Ooh - a link. A path threough the trees back to a familiar place in a different setting.
A similar scene began...

Wait a minute, didn't I say this wasn't my favourite album?

Reconsider: reflect: recall. The Golden Section Disc 2 opened my ears to all I had previously missed from the original album.
All of a sudden, Crash and Burn (Deluxe Edition) brings (at least) two of my all-tme Foxx Five onto the same album.

Ah, well. Maybe. Though... I guess - is that so?

I see

Cracking review Martin.

Never heard a track described as female before

I don't know if time has withered my resistance or the new Crash & Burn mastering has given me clarity but I finally get this album like I never did before.

That’s a lovely comment. Very interesting observations about the new material Martin, nice review.

I’ve had a go –

Edward Kienholz was initially a Los Angeles gallery owner who started to concentrate on his own art in the 1960’s. Working as an installation artist he used found objects, assemblages and figures cast from life. He is credited with contributing to a theory initially explored by Marcel Duchamp, by suggesting that ‘the idea’ for a work of art is ‘more important than the physically finished product’. By the 70’s this had become a major art movement with artists questioning the use of art and claiming that ‘the true’ work of art is not the finished object for exhibition, but rather, it is the concepts or ideas expressed from within it which are the true art.

When the Tate Liverpool opened in 1988 its first exhibition was called Starlit Waters, one of the exhibits was a glass of water contributed by Michael craig-Martin, which he had titled ‘An Oak Tree’. This was a typically conceptual piece of art, of which the end product was not the glass filled with water - the intention and purpose of the object and the title was actually to make the viewer consider the relationship between a glass of water and a tree.

Kienholz Starlit?

Got my copies today!!!

Agreed, but sometimes the dust and dog hair ARE the diamonds.

Unless you have an allergy to either.

Got mine last week and I have to say that listening to Young Savage from the Cargo gig ( on Sideways) was one of my most enjoyable moments of John Foxx listening for years.
Its raw and nasty. Superb!!

I have never been much of a fan of JF revamping these old songs such as the man Who Dies Everyday for instance. But this is different.
Buy it!

Thanks for these both remasters, especially the bonus material.
Haunted and the instrumental tracks are very good.
It's great to have live versions from the Cargo gig. I had this on my wishlist - so thanks for that a lot!

I hope for some live stuff of the 2006 tour on the forthcoming From Trash deluxe edition too...

Would be great listening to Walk Away and Slow Motion along with some other tracks again.... ( It's on my second wishlist )


Cheers, Andreas

Just a quick note to let you know that the recently released deluxe editions of both Crash and Burn and Sideways are now available on Amazon.

Rob

Excellent to see both of these reissues now available on the excellent Norman Records site (two uses of the word excellent there, but well deserved in both cases!) (And theres even a shop page for Interplay).

The (I quote) 'Considerate Wheat Crunchie Norman Records Weekly Update 2011‏' -

http://www.normanrecords.com/artists/17587&artist=John%20Foxx%20&%20Louis%20Gordon