List | S | The Shamen | 'Boss Drum' CD 1992

Track:	Name:	Time:
1.	Boss Drum	6:28
2.	L.S.I.: Love Sex Intelligence	3:44
3.	Space Time	4:59
4.	Librae Solidi Denari	5:25
5.	Ebeneezer Goode Beatmasters Mix	6:12
6.	Comin' On	4:25
7.	Phorever People	4:52
8.	Fatman	5:39
9.	Scientas	5:38
10.	Re:Evolution	8:21
11.	Boss Dub	5:22
12.	Phorever Dub	3:54
	Total	65:46

Comments:

Ironically, when The Shamen got worse, I bought more of their stuff, mainly due to the fact that they were a lot easier to get hold of. The Will Sinn influence of En-Tact is nowhere to be heard, for apparent reasons. Instead, Mr C seems to get a lot more attention, to my increasing annoyance. Overall, the music is a lot poppier, more mainstream, and there's some black soul-type female singer named Jhelisa Anderson appearing on several songs - not providing the angelic twist of Plavka on the dreamy Hyperreal, but rather a slick, smooth commercial sounding voice adding to the mainstream technopop feel. Not unlike many recent cheap disco projects (some guys doing cheap dance-techno with some good-looking black girl with big tits doing some soul-sleaze type vocals), only not just quite as bad. But the most anoying thing with the album is that Mr C pops up in almost every single track, instantly sinking it at least a little.

That said, it's still a rather good techno/pop/disco album, albeit straying further from what I used to love about the Shamen. There are still some of those odd oriental-sounding Colin Angus melodies here and there, and some interesting guitar experiments, but the poppy tracks are poppier than before, leaving mostly the instrumental techno tracks to please me. I do like the poppy tracks as well, but I feel they could have been done so much better. Like 'Ebeneezer Goode' - it starts off as one of the most interesting techno tracks of the album, until Mr C pops his head in and starts ranting some silly lyrics about this specific party dude (interestingly enough, the lyrics work very well, if not better, if you replace his name with the name of a small pill known to be distributed at rave parties). In a similar manner, Mr C destroys 'Comin' On', which otherwise could have been a quite decent track. His directly stupid-sounding rambling is the main reason I never bought this single.

One of the best tracks of the album has to be 'Phorever People' (despite its stupid spelling), since it reminds me of the excellent Hyperreal - it's perhaps a little less dreamy and more upbeat, but in some ways it's still similar. Too bad they screwed it up on the single. Another interesting track is 'Re:Evolution' which is based around the words of Terence McKenna, speaking about rave culture and throwing in some spiritual new age type stuff and the use of psychadelic plants (i.e. drug propaganda), over a drum machine beat and some spacey blips (reminding me a bit of Hear Me). The rhythm tempo is slowed down when he speaks slowly, and when he gets more excited about something and speaks faster, the rhythm tempo is also increased to match. It's quite effective. If I didn't think he's mainly talking jibberish, I might have been converted :-)

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