THE WAR OF THE WORLDS - ULLADUBULLA (THE REMIX ALBUM)

The dance based beats which feature on a significant proportion of the original "War of the worlds"" album implied that a remix album was always going to be on the cards. "War of the worlds" therefore benefits from such a remix album much more than the music of Yes and ELP did, since the tracks here do not sound that different from the originals.

As I am sure you will already have realised, this is by no means a prog album. While "War of the worlds" was arguably a commercial prog rock album, "Ulladubulla" successfully removes all vestiges of prog, to be replaced by dub and trance. This naturally renders the album superfluous in terms of the focus of this site, but it does not in itself make this a bad album.

I have two main criticisms of this collection. Firstly, the tracks are not presented in the correct order, making for a rather haphazard sequencing which totally destroys any semblance of a story. The story was of course a key part of the appeal of original album. Secondly, a number of tracks are repeated two or three times, in different remixed versions. As with the ELP "Brain Salad Perjury" album, this becomes tedious when listening to the umpteenth version of the same song. A very effective remedy to both these complaints is to select your favourite version of each remix, and record them in their original sequence to a single disc.

Inevitably, some of the remixes are more successful than others, although the degrees of success have more to do with what the remixer has chosen to do with the track, than any preconceived suitability of each track for remixing treatment. In some cases, such as Max Mondo's re-working of "The eve of the war", there is not a great deal of difference from the original version. A more accentuated dance beat perhaps, and some general re-organising of the sound effects are the most notable changes.

On others, such as the same mixer's version of "Horsall common and the heat ray", additional instrumentation (or at least electronic creation) appears to have been added. The N-Trance remix of "Forever autumn" is rather predictable, being done in the same way as the many trance adaptations of ballads which breach the top 20 singles charts. Without the distinctive vocals of Justin Hayward, this could be a Robert Miles track.

As remix albums go, and especially when compared to albums such as those ELP and Yes remixes, "UllaDubUlla" is by and large successful. The versions included are faithful enough to the original songs to retain much of their appeal, while offering a new slant on each.

Certainly not an album for anyone looking for prog, this is just about as far away as we get on this site. For those who enjoyed the original "War of the worlds" and who enjoy good trance music, this is worthy of investigation.

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