PARANOISE

While the liner notes call this album "metal jazz", I believe a better description would be "hip hop punk jazz". Mostly, this is aggressive, but highly creative attitude adjustment music. These guys are angry. But they know how to build a great band. With sidemen like Don Cherry, Gary Windo, Melvin Gibbs, their album is going to have something going for it. And then there's Percy Jones. This most amazing bass play could perform over the sound of monkeys throwing their poop, and make it into something wonderful.

The best songs are the ones with the great Mr. Jones: Carburetor, Constant Fear and Forget About The Earth/This Is Where It's At. And the Isley Brother's Fight The Power gets a strong reworking as well.

Not for the faint of heart, but this album has a lot of great music in it.

QUOTE "At the end of the 20th century, I stand slack-jawed in horror in view of the dramatically increasing domination of the wealth and resources of the planet by a smaller and smaller segment of the population. This coupled with the almost complete disappearance of functioning democracy as a result of new international structures of finance and trade has systematically lowered the standard of living for the majority of people. The western world of patriarchy, technology and militarism is holding a gun to the head of the western world. The third world is on it's knees and blindfolded. In the next 25 years, this imperialist system may destroy every last remnant of indigenous culture

By design, capitalism will seek out and destroy these people and their unique ways of interpreting reality and replace them with uninformed consumers of what amounts to a pre-progammed American diet. Having allowed this to happen as a result of ignorance and indifference, we as Americans are as guilty as the Germans in World War II who blindly followed the marchings of Hitler. It's out of control and we don't even know what it is that we don't know. What is it? You'll never find out by reading The New York Times or watching CNN. The media is owned by these same corporations hat hold the cards for pundits who introduce meaningless, hypnotic phrases like "Big Government" and "Support The Troops" and serve to perpetuate the system. Even the music industry is now part of this global market whole sole driving force is profit.

The music on this record in some abstract way represents in my mind a model for interaction and third world indigenous people. By preserving the culture and extracting samples we can study it. Instead of changing and dominating their systems of order we can adjoin and build onto them and create a new civilization using the best from each. Hopefully the music we've created here does something like that. It attempts to collaborate in new ways using technology (sampling) thereby keeping the original music intact. Starting from there we've reharmonized and rearranged the original without destroying it, and tried to create something new using western musical systems and high-powered aggressive timbres and rhythms. The result being the weaving of a musical/mathematical partnership. A vast geometry. Hyperdimensional, ancient geometry." - Jim Matus

As you can see from the above, this album has a political statement to get over and on listening to this album this comes over very clearly, one other thing that is evident right from the start is the third world influence within the music.

The opening track 'Evil Vs. Evil' starts with what sounds like an Indian chant and soon after the music comes in, the chant is still there but in the background. The music is quite fast and furious, but very melodic and following the original chant, there's a nice break with some excellent violin work about two thirds through and then it's back to the fast and furious guitars.

The next track 'Instability, Containment, Rollback', starts off with some sampled vocals, then the music comes in, this track has a slower beat than the previous track, but the musicianship is just superb. At this point I must say, that I found the lyrics very down to earth. To me the band are more concerned with getting the message across to the listener rather than write lyrics that don't make any sense or just rhyme for the sake of it. There's some excellent violin and guitar work.

The third track 'Tetrahedral Metaphor', starts off with the third world influence and this continues throughout the track, but with Paranoise's style of progressive rock combined with some outstanding guitar work. Don't get me wrong the whole band play a major part in the music, but for me it's the textured guitar and violin that plays a huge part in the build up of the Paranoise sound.

The next track 'Mechanical World', this is a slightly heavier sounding track and with the combination of guitar and violin comes over sounding quite a bit similar to Mahavishnu Orchestra. And I must admit the violin on this track is just stunning.

'International Monetary Fun', this is another track hat right from the start has a third world influence within the music. Paranoise seem to find it easy to take a small piece of music from a third world country and then build on it from there incorporating their own ideas. This track once again features some outstanding musicianship and also has some tribal drums, that sound similar to something I have heard on a Sepultura album, not that Paranoise' sound is anywhere near to that. Once again the guitar and violin work is simply superb.

The sixth track 'Constant Fear', this is another track, that for me sounds a little similar in style to that of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. But that is mainly due to the way the violin sound is delivered.

The next track 'Structural Adjustment', this is one of my favourite tracks, starting with digeridoo, before there's this fantastic rhythm that's come in, the vocals are a bit more subdued on this track, but build slightly for the chorus. I know the same words re repeated throughout the chorus, but for me that doesn't matter, the rhythm has this kind of hypnotic feel to it, that just keeps the listener wanting for more. This is quite a long track being nearly nine minutes and there are many changes in direction, mood and tempo throughout. Once again there some superb violin and stunning guitar work.

'Private Power', starts with tribal drum sounds, with sampled vocals and the track just builds up from then on, eventually getting quite a bit heavier. Heavy guitar, a strong drum sound and Thorne's powerful vocals. Once again, there are are many changes in direction, mood and tempo.

The ninth track 'Tarana', another favourite of mine, starts off with what I can now say is the usual third world influence and gradually the band are added to compliment and expand the sound.

'Not There', this is another track in which the violin plays a major part, the vocals are once again excellent and the guitar work is stunning and for me has a kind of Zappareque style.

The next track 'Centerless Grinding', another track that starts off with what sounds like Indian chanting, then the whole band comes in carrying on in the same vein. The rhythm fast and furious and is almost hypnotic with some outstanding guitar and violin over the top.

The final track is 'Monuments', starts off with tribal drums, then the band comes following the same beat, there's some sampled voices before Thorne's vocals come in, not that he sings much on this track, his voice just follows the melody along. There are many changes throughout this track. This track reminds me quite a bit of some early progressive rock bands such as Comus, Esperanto and Beggars Opera. After about five and a half minutes, the music fades and in comes some more sampled voices with some chanting going on in the background.

Paranoise combine samples of World music with progressive rock music. Not forgetting that this album also has a political statement to say too. For me, I thought that the album was excellent and loved the way in which Paranoise construct each track. This is an album that appeals right from the moment you press play and I know that I will be playing it quite a lot in the months to come. This album should appeal to lovers of good progressive rock music and to fans of such bands as Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Whoah!!! This album is not for the faint of heart. The "Jazz rock/fusion" label just doesn't do it justice. Imagine super-fast super-complex electronic drums, dissonant honking guitar lines, dense horn arrangements, and a vocalist who sounds like an angry Puerto Rican version of Steve Tyler on methamphetamines. The end result sounds quite a bit like Bill Nelson's "Red Noise" project, except a whole lot scarier. Start a New Race" features a hilariously dragged-out cover of The Soul Survivors' motown hit "Expressway to your Heart". There is also some very cool Percy Jones bass riffage too.

This is not a concept album, but the lyrics seem to have an overarching theme of the downtrodden outsider versus mainstream society. However it avoids the overt left- wing posturing that later incarnations of Paranoise would embrace.

Edited 09/27/05!

This is a world fusion album with a very clear political message as stated in the booklet:

....."The economies of the 21st century are being built on a metaphysics that died in the 17th century. These metaphysics are dead and all life forms are atomistic constitutions of dead matter. Modern economy is based on theft. The WTO rules legitimize that theft. The present rules are high tech rules for slavery. The culture that we are living in is an infantile culture. The world is set on a course of catastrophe.".......

A message that I can fully support BTW. For this review, I'd like to put this a bit aside, what's not that easy since it's a very essential part of this work. Even if one concentrates exclusively on the music, one has to admit that this is a great album. It's actually very difficult to describe, one really has to listen to it. Oriental vocals and percussion, perfectly melt together with elements of folk and hardrock, driving guitars, great violin and grooving rhythms. It's definitively not another one of these "west meets east-kinda world music" albums, it's completely different. An absolute masterpiece and an essential album for anyone interested in general humanistic questions and actually it should be listened by all fanatics from any religion and all political and economic leaders of western world who are mainly responsible for all the misery and terrorism in our one and only world that belongs to everybody!

Although possibly being not an essential one in prog in general, I would say this great album is worth 4 (or even 4 1/2 stars)!