10 Years of People Like Us (CD on Mess Media – MESS1) – 2002
SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE
The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish pastiche out of borrowed finery for the sake of self-conscious kitschiness; on the other hand, the risk of making simplistic, heavy handedly “topical” audio-jokes at the expense of one’s raw material to a smug effect. If the lounge creeps uncritically snack on their sonic ingredients and coast on being “groovy”, the cads of pseudo-critique take cheap shots at straw men and call it subversion. Happily, Vicki Bennett has yet to fall down either precipice, but yodels down contentedly from her own Alpine audio-cottage. There, with loving care, she snips and tucks at the lycra jumpsuit until the fit is snug, places every plastic shrub on the Happy Valley Ranch just so, and throws another dance record on the bonfire. Undercutting her own utopian mirages with formal breakdowns and sneaky semantic pranks, Vicki Bennett is One Funny Lady, with a deadly sense of comic timing that puts her in my personal pantheon of edit intensive music makers: -Steinski and Mass Media, Hank Shocklee, Tod Dockstader, Teo Macero, the Hanatarash, John Oswald, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock. Serving her birthday cake with a turd, her gags are always lined with a virulent creep factor. You get the feeling that the vacancy and pointlessness of empty speech is being lampooned and mourned in equal measure. In sticking to this balance of celebration and critique, People Like Us genuinely hates and loves People Like You. The least you can do is head up to the Happy Valley Ranch for a spell and have a listen.
Drew Daniel
01. Another Kind Of Humor intro
02. OB & Cha Cha
03. Guide To Broadcasting excerpt
04. Smash & Grab
05. The Sacred Erm
06. Sing With Melodious Inarticulate Sound…
07. A Crossed Line excerpt
08. Clippety Cart Horse
09. In The Panto
10. Ursula Fährt Ski
11. T424PLU excerpt
12. More Plunderblunders excerpt
13. Ski Heil excerpt
14. We Believe
15. T424PLU excerpt
16. Sound Escape excerpt
17. Sound Escape excerpt
18. Handjob
19. If Someone Touches You (with The Jet Black Hair People and Wobbly)
20. Music Of Your Own
21. Millenium Dome
22. My Son Jim
23. More Plunderblunders excerpt
24. Oompah Pumpah
25. I’m 89
26. Take A Walk
27. Morning Pedro
28. We Believe excerpt
29. Bran Mash & Crushed Beans
30. We’re Gonna Be Around
Mess Media through Soleilmoon website
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