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Spike Hyzer
A big fan of Post Punk, Punk, Goth, New Wave, and Electronic music, the more British or Euro the better (though I am from the US and love much of our own as well).
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Spike Hyzer's Album Reviews
Only slightly overrated by fans, Vampire also ranks ever so slightly below the wonderful breakthrough that was Propeller (perhaps the true starting point for GBV, thus making this the sophomore slump LP). The overall sound of the music is phenomenal and the album boasts such stone cold classics as Expecting Brainchild, Sot, Jar of Cardinals and Gleemer and also features quite a number of near classics (Giant, #2, Dusted, Unstable, and the last four tracks), but the whole enterprise is marred somewhat by vocals that are extremely buried in the mix.
Much of the rest of the album is pleasantly above average, with the exceptions of the utterly awful World of Fun and nearly as bad E-5, but by strict individual rankings of each song I came out with a fine average of 3.72 stars.
The sequencing is not Bob's finest and the buried vocals prevent me from bumping it up to a 4 star record simply because the flow is halted by those truly bad songs (Propeller, on the other hand, drags only slightly in one spot and I feel somehow that its heights are far greater than those experienced here).
I do often think that if Pollard had been a more refined editor at this point in his career, he might have dropped his first masterpiece a bit sooner by compiling the very best songs from these two albums and relegating the average material to the margins of EPs and the singles from this set.
Much of the rest of the album is pleasantly above average, with the exceptions of the utterly awful World of Fun and nearly as bad E-5, but by strict individual rankings of each song I came out with a fine average of 3.72 stars.
The sequencing is not Bob's finest and the buried vocals prevent me from bumping it up to a 4 star record simply because the flow is halted by those truly bad songs (Propeller, on the other hand, drags only slightly in one spot and I feel somehow that its heights are far greater than those experienced here).
I do often think that if Pollard had been a more refined editor at this point in his career, he might have dropped his first masterpiece a bit sooner by compiling the very best songs from these two albums and relegating the average material to the margins of EPs and the singles from this set.
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