Faithless - Outrospective Special Edition

YOURZ

What is this atmospheric shit - sounds like 'B' grade video game music.  Oh, wait a minute, here comes something interesting...  Oh, no it's not, its just a bit.  What the  fuck?  Okay, maybe I'm being picky but any song that takes ages to start then stops before it really goes anywhere shouldn't be the first song on an album. 

There are a couple of good tracks on this.  Not Enuff has a sort of pre-grime, dub-step beat and a tidy rap coupled with a very smooth female melody line, just the kind of thing I like in my hip hop.   Most of the tracks are along the lines of the first and don't interest me in the slightest.  Muhammad Ali starts with a kind of disco feel joined with another very good rap then brings up another great hook.  Lyrically, it's a clever homage to the great man as well as being a bit of biography of the rapper.  The rest of the album features more of the same atmospheric stuff.  Okay, time for the Reperspective, the remix disc.

This CD held my attention for as long as it took me to skip through the tracks.  Again, maybe I'm being a bit picky but seriously, this disappointed me.  I'd only ever heard good things about Faithless and to be honest, both discs had maybe a half-dozen songs that held my interest for their length.  But then, I've never been a fan of this kind of dance music except for Massive Attack, who do it way better.

VERDICT: THROW IT OUT (after ripping Not Enuff and Muhammad Ali)

MINE

Ooooh, this was harsh.  It's been a rough week for both Your and Mine(self) with the loss of our beautiful cat after nursing her back from the brink a couple of months ago.  That's why I'm feeling vulnerable, I'm (firmly) telling myself.  There I was, wondering why I hadn't played this CD for so long, thinking about how I would explain this purchase to Your (which of course I bought for the remixes - I've barely listened to the plain unvarnished version).

I was glad I was in the car when Crazy English Summer came on.  "Great," I thought, "I love this song!"  And then I was singing along to - Sometimes I feel like I'm glad to be free/ Sometimes I still want your arms around me/ Sometimes I'm glad to have left you behind/ The crazy English summer's put you back on my mind

I burst into tears.  Because this song recalls the pain I felt after a relationship (before YourZ, well before) when I was so devastated by my loss, I had to go to counselling.  In fact, I recall sitting on my sofa, in my little flat, listening to this song over and over again and sobbing my heart out, until I was in such emotional turmoil I dug my fingernails into my legs and raked them until they bled, because the physical pain was preferable.

Funny, I could have sworn that feeling was over long ago.  I'm not in love with that person any more, and I'm not even sure that what I felt then was love - more a kind of all-consuming obsession.  I'm telling myself it's only because I'm feeling emotional this week.  Is that PMS I spy?  Or is it just that listening to that one song can put me back in that moment, particularly because it affected me so much?  But it's left me feeling a bit indecisive about Outrospective or rather about  Reperspective, which is what the remixes are called.

VERDICT: TURN IT UP (but let's skip that song, OK?)

For more information: http://faithless.co.uk/