Gang of Four - Return The Gift
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CD Details
Artist: Gang of FourEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2005-10-11
Music Label: V2 North America
Soundtracks:
- To Hell With Poverty
- Damaged Goods
- Natural's Not In It
- Not Great Men
- Why Theory?
- Anthrax
- Paralysed
- What We All Want
- Ether
- He'd Send The Army
- Capital
- I Love A Man In Uniform
- At Home He's A Tourist
- We Live As We Dream, Alone
Music reviews of Return The Gift
Music Review: And the Party goes on . . .
Rating: 4 Stars
More like three-and-a-half stars
And the Party goes on . . . when we think of Gang of Four, though, the Socialist Party comes to mind as readily as the all-night kind. This is what largely sets them above the recent slew of bands like the Killers and Franz Ferdinand who have made platinum by drawing heavily on the quarter-century old sound of these post-punk pioneers. Go4 show right from the beginning of Return the Gift that they still rock harder than their fresher counterparts even if grey is beginning to show. The CD starts with danceable thumping and the echoing yelps of Jon King; instead of containing the lyrical trappings of pop anthems, though, their refrain is "To Hell with Poverty," a song from their landmark Entertainment.
Return the Gift is comprised of remakes from their first three albums. They did this to update the thin drum sound of their original releases; the guitars become fuller in the mix, as well. The crisp engineering makes several of these songs more exhilarating than ever. They remain almost completely faithful to the originals, though change is evident, little of it for the worse: Andy Gill's wry intonations on "Paralysed" are dropped an octave or so from the earlier piece, likely because he has put on weight, making his diatribe more baritone than tenor these days. The political barbs sound a bit less urgent than they did half a life ago for Gill and King. The melodica, an instrument like a toy piano one blows into, is missing from the bridge of the provocative "Ether"; though Go4's music thrives off of minimal elements, the absent repetitive figure of the original cries to be replaced by something. Some of the thick tension of the original is lost.
But you still want to take on the Man. It has been said that ideological content doesn't make for good art, but if done well, it seems far better and more enduring than rehashed tales of the jet-set. These veterans seem to symbolically return the gift of false flattery that the younger generation has given them through near-plagiarism, making the ironic mantra from "Natural's Not in It" seem even more prescient now: "Repackaged sex keeps your interest"-in other words, sex only keeps the consumer's interest for the time while he dances to the latest alterna-disco hit, more likely boosting the financial interests of those with the means of production. A little Marxist materialism with your dissonant funk seems one way to develop staying power. Even though Go4 demur to their less substantial pupils, the new, more financially successful pack of musicians would be wise to pay attention and pepper their skronky riffs with something more engagé, like the content of these formidable standards.
Description of Return The Gift
Limited two disc pressing of the Post-Punk band's 2005 album features a bonus 12-track disc of remixes by contempary artists and producers such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Ladytron, The Rakes, The Dandy Warhols, producer du jour Paul Epworth, The Rakes, Amusment Parks on Fire, The Others, Faultline and more! Gang of Four are best described as being ''ahead of their time''. Usually it means nothing; mere hack hyperbole employed to describe the latest fledgling bunch of chancers. In Gang Of Four's case, it's a stone-cold empirical fact. So the time is right for a return of the great men themselves with a (sort of) new album. Return The Gift is a album that finds Go4 re-recording seminal tracks from 'Entertainment!', 'Solid Gold' and 'Songs Of The Free'. 25 tracks in all. V2.Alternative Rock CDs
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