Shamelessly Exciting

I love the mashed up million beats per minute ragga jungle drum 'n bass spazzcore as much as the next guy. Breakbeats chopped to bits and re-assembled into unplayable-by-humans hyperspeed electronic grind. Can't get enough. But anyone with a computer can whip up a earsplitting storm of beats and NOISE. There are of course a select few who approach their beats and samples and fist-to-the-face aggression as if they were, well, WRITING SONGS. Obviously this stuff is not for the dance floor, and as much as I love a huge slab of all out white hot sonic mayhem, a deft touch and some strange ideas applied to the very same ingredients can result in something truly amazing. The most recent Venetian Snares is a perfect example, dizzyingly complex drill and bass perfectly placed amidst gorgeous strings and melancholy melodies.

And now Mr. Jason Forrest, formerly known in electronic music circles as Donna Summer, has decided to take his own personal splattery drumf-ck brutality and temper it with songs, pop songs, vocalists, guitars, some serious HOOKS. Every track on here is still an amazing piece of masterful slicing and dicing, a busy blur of sample upon sample, beats careening wildly into other beats, getting all tangled up into gnarled chunks of dense rhythm and strange lumps of rock guitars and clipped vocals. Each track sounds like it was assembled from someone with ADD whipping through the classic rock stations on the radio dial, lots of wild guitar leads, wailing rock vocalists, throbbing rock bass, groovy pianos, shuffling jazzy interludes, full on rock freakouts, snippets of Steely Dan, Blondie and about a million more almost recognizable samples and of course lots of incredibly dense and un-funky and completely unhinged drum programming.

Country chantuese Laura Cantrell sings on one of the prettiest tracks, her gorgeous croon, laid atop a smeary blur of glitchy beats and hiccupping grooves, purloined from seventies AM radio. But that's merely the calm before, and after, and between the storms! Soon you're back on a bucking bronco made from every song you loved in highschool tossed in a blender, careening wildly through dense thickets of heavy metal guitar, prickly drum and bass, walls of guitar solos, cheezy synth jams, and old school funk grooves, creepy childlike vocals, and of course the kitchen sink. This is one of those records that seems too busy and too overwhelmingly jampacked to be at all listenable, but somehow Forrest manages to take all those parts and tie 'em up with a big red bow. Shamelessly Exciting indeed!

Mixing a willfull disregard for copyright issues with a punk rock sensibility and a midas touch for splicing and mashing samples together, Jason Forrest has been releasing mindbending electronic music mainly comprised of other peoples creations for some time now. His first real shot across the bow was under the name Donna Summer with This Needs To Be Your Style, then he crashed the party again last year with the excellent The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash and dropped the more varied taste of things to come with his Lady Fantasy EP earlier this year.

Shamelessly Exciting is the latest full length from Forrest, and if you've liked his previous work, you're not going to go wrong here, even though he tosses out a few curveballs. The release opens in fairly typical style, blasting out of the speakers with the ballistic "The Walls Of The City Shake" as guitar riffage flies almost like bouncing ping pong balls over chopped-up chunky breakbeats and "New Wave Folk Austerity" keeps things slamming after an almost loungey intro with stuttering blasts of New Wave (I swear the main riff is pilfered Blondie) that offset with quieter finger-picked guitar (with beats that keep thumping away behind).

"My 36 Favorite Punk Songs" is just as the title states, with a whole crazy slew of riffs (including more noticible ones from The Clash and The Ramones) slammed up against one another that somehow work quite well. Forrest seems to have an ear for hooks, and several tracks on the album seem like they're plundered for the absolute maximum possible head-nodding effect. "Storming Blues Rock" and "War Photographer" are both impossibly packed full of goodness, and the latter turns into a sort of funked-out horn-laced beast that kicks like a mule.

The complete odd track out on the album is "Nightclothes And Headphones," which is easily the most poppy thing that Forrest has done to date. With contributed vocals from Laura Cantrell, the track is so sedate (despite some background glitchery) that it almost sounds like it was pulled from a different album. It's by no means bad, and it makes me wonder what Forrest could do if he went ahead and tried to make a more straightforward disc, but it nonetheless sounds a little weird when it's sequenced right next to the lumbering 70s rock versus insane rhythmic workout of "Dust Never Settles." As mentioned above, the album is almost all hooks, and like most albums of said variety, it's a load of fun but doesn't always stick to your ribs. For a quick blast of loud fun, though, you're not going to do much better.

(from almost cool music reviews)

While this album may not be everything I'm looking for in a great record, Jason Forrest (AKA DJ Donna Summers) takes the title of his record to heart and provides us, the lucky listeners, with ten tracks of shamelessly exciting music. It doesn't have to have a consistent beat, it doesn't have to stay in one genre, heck, it doesn't have to make sense! This record drips with exuberance in a way that I can't fully comprehend and I'm glad that Jason Forrest is alive to be such a brilliant musician and arranger.
And if for nothing else, you must buy this album to own the experience of my two favorite tracks off this album, My 36 Favorite Punk Songs which is exactly so, and the absolutely groundbreaking War Photographer. Check out the music video on youtube. I would rather be stuck on a desert island with nothing but that music video than to have access to every #1 hit from the past three years, and I would be a better man for it.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews  4.3 out of 5 stars