Author: Captain Capm (Page 12 of 118)

The Spice Girls – “Raw Spice”

The only real reason to waste your time watching this “unofficial” documentary of the Spice Girls before they made it big is to see Victoria Adams constantly smiling and with some meat on her bones. Other than that, this is just a cheap opportunistic piece of crap undoubtedly made by the group’s original management of Chris and Bob Herbert. Watching the same clips of the girls rehearsing a song called “We’re Gonna Make It Happen” in a dumpy little studio gets old fast, and hearing the various nobody-talking heads either trash or praise Geri Halliwell for her original instinctive drive to want to have the group become huge and get the hell away from Heart Management is completely uninteresting. Though hearing the girls talk about their aspirations and feelings towards each other is slightly fascinating, this is ultimately just boring archival footage with no Spice Girls tunes or input from any of the girls themselves. Another “unauthorized” waste of time you can easily ignore.

Click to buy “Raw Spice”

iiO – Rapture Reconstruction Platinum Edition

For all the iiO fans who can’t get enough of the classic dance tune “Rapture,” here’s a two-disc set featuring 18 remixes of the tune. Like any collection of remixes, Rapture Reconstruction is a hit and miss experience, and of course it really all comes down to personal opinion of just which remixes are the best here. The opening “Starkillers Dirty Girl Made Single Edit” is better than “Starkillers Undone Made Single Edit” just two tracks later, for example. Part of the problem is sitting through the whole thing and not going slightly nuts from it trying to pick out the wheat from the chaff. Even the dub versions are split right down the middle of good and irritating (the spacey “Hardware & Orue Electric Dub” is light years better than the “Friscia & Lamboy Dub,” which grates pretty fast). The second disc – the “Classic Enhanced Disk”- fares no differently. The “Armin Van Buuren remix” is a good example of classic hard trance done right, while the “Deep Dish Space Remix” sounds lazy and uninspired, like any generic remix you’d care to name. If you want to get as close to the real thing, though, the “Original Extended Mix” is the very last cut here and it shines through so much of the other versions here. Sometimes sticking to the real thing is the best decision. (Made 2008)

iiO MySpace page.

Too $hort – Get Off the Stage

Holy Christ. Who even knew this dude was still making CDs? Look, plain and simple this is as bad as rap gets nowadays. Too $hort is still stuck in a bubble waxing about how great he is, what he has, and how he likes “big titties.” Yeah…go figure. Of course, what else to expect with tracks such as the stunning “Shittin’ On ‘Em” (“You a soldier, nigga I’m a vet, what?“) or how $hort embraces the English lexicon with the remarkable “F.U.C.K.Y.O.U.” (“Fuck you / Nigga, fuck you, too! / Nigga, F.U.C.K.Y.O.U.!“)? Yes, it’s all in a lazy, easy day’s work shitting out inconsequential track after inconsequential track and reaping the benefits of having absolutely no real talents and letting the record label pump money into your pockets. Must be real nice. But hey, who am I to complain when I can groove effortlessly to the sexy heat of “Pull Them Panties Down”? “Tryin’ to see you get naked,” exclaims Too at the beginning. Then the full-on erotica ensues: “Gotta see the pink now / G’wan pull them panties down” and “You need to let them panties leave ya ankles / Show ’em you a bad bitch, fuck these stank hos.” Ready to pull out your wallet and let your money do the voting yet? No? Really? Why not? Doesn’t hearing $hort repeat “Gotta get a bitch and get my dick sucked” over and over on “Gangstas & Strippers” not get you horny, baby? Dayum! But really, who knew this dude was still making CDs? Yeesh. (Jive 2007)

Too $hort MySpace page.

Jet Lag Gemini: Fire the Cannons

You’d think after all this time that bands like Jet Lag Gemini would just go away. You know the formula by now: throw in one part pop guitar spewing power chords, one part bass guitar playing paint-by-numbers, one part drummer who can hold a backbeat and go double time at the choruses when necessary, and one part young male vocalist/musician who can sing about the pains of friendships and chicks and do it with soaring melodicism. Yuck. It’s the kind of warmed-over glop that has been populating various “Tony Hawk” video game soundtracks for too many years now and it’s on full display here in the tracks throughout Fire the Cannons. Jet Lag Gemini and bands of its ilk are the last thing on any meter measuring originality. This is safe, dumb, and ultimately boring pop played out for the 14- to 17-year-old-crowd with nary a care in the world. (Doghouse Records, 2008)

Jet Lag Gemini MySpace page.

The Beautiful Girls – Ziggurats

It’s hard to get excited about B-grade dub. Dub is one of those genres that bands who are playing it either really nail it down from the start or just kind of meander with the ideas and have no strong execution of them when all is said and done. The Beautiful Girls are one such band. Ziggurats is filled with a bunch of uninspiring dub-inspired numbers that sound almost comatose at times. For proof, look no further than the first two tracks here, “Royalty” and “Sir, Your Fashion Has the Cold Heart of a Killer (ugh). The former veers between overbaked rawk and listless dub while the latter is about as generic white boy dub as you can get. Both songs sound like they’re about to collapse from either ennui or exhaustion, which is funny considering there’s zero energy floating around here. However, when the band drops the dub nonsense and goes a power pop route, like on “Thought About You” complete with tasty handclaps, things get a little more interesting. Unfortunately, that only happens once out of 13 tracks total here. The rest of the album is spent doing retreads of the “Royalty” groove, or passing gas with uninteresting acoustic ditties (“Dela”). Stick to the pop, boys. (Controlled Substance Sound Labs 2007)

The Beautiful Girls MySpace page.

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