Boom Boom Satellites - Exposed (Album)
I have an old ribbon printer in my office I call Bruce that gets a run every now and again just to keep the inkjet on its toes. If you remember, they are the printers that don’t just print… they bump, grind, snort, and sing their way through a job. The other day I was giving Bruce a few charity sheets to print when he broke into some fantastic electro-style bleeping. It was honestly as if Bruce had transformed from an honest, hardworking dot matrix printer, into my very own German minimalist beatmaster. I couldn’t believe it. To test if my ears were playing games I re-printed the same document. Lo and behold, the office again turned into some sort of avant garde Stuttgart club, circa 1977. It is as if this document turns Bruce into an electro-pianola.
I tell you all this because I have been set the task of reviewing the latest offering from Boom Boom Satellites, their album Exposed. I can honestly say that my printer has produced better music than this bunch of Japanese clichés. I bet they wear fluoro.
The album starts off with a driving beat, and a real sense of urgency. It sounds good! However, the album never progresses from there. The songs maintain the monorhythmic beat, the choruses sound exactly the same. Put simply, it is music-by-numbers at its worse. When you hold up this album, next to say Silent Shout by The Knife, it looks simply embarrassing. The only time this CD bordered on exciting was when it skipped. For a beautiful moment there I thought they had actually changed rhythm. Alas, I was sadly mistaken. In fact the only enjoyment I derived from this disc was that the skipping disc prompted me to daydream about being transported back 25 years and joining Grand Master Flash’s Furious Five… scratching up a storm like Afrika Bambaataa in a New York club, surrounded by hip cats with afros. Unfortunately, my daydream was cut short when I remembered that I’m a weedy white guy from Melbourne, whose only scratching consisted of being left out of the recorder ensemble. Meanwhile, Boom Boom Satellites continued on like some sort of relentless pacemaker. Except for the fact pacemakers have heart.
