Adam Stone Dead Sea Apes Black Tempest – ‘Dataland’ (2021)
As the world continues to dig itself out of the increasingly oppressive doldrums brought on by the COVID-19 virus, this trio of favourites collaborated over the internet to create a bleak collection of psychedelic warnings featuring extended forays into electronica, guitar pyrotechnics, and Adam Stone’s dystopian spoken word monologues rueing the mechanisation and roboticism that has overtaken our society.
Opener ‘Lost Hours’ plonks into our brains like Kraftwerk fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn, pursued by Giorgio Moroder astride the midnight express.
Stone’s monotonic observations swirl hypnotically around the increasingly evocative metronomic onslaught from Tempest and the Apes like an assembly-line Sturm und Drang marching world soundtracked by Carl Stallings.
‘Time To Eat Again’ updates Daniel (The Normal) Miller’s ‘Warm Leatherette’ for the car-crash set, and the title track flows like a slowly expanding cancer reaching its tentacles out to subvert your grey matter and place your mind under its unrelentingly addictive need to feed your technological jones for more, more, more data, or as I was taught in programming class, GIGO – Garbage In/Garbage Out.
Stop me before I click again! “We just need to know” will become the mantra for our times.
Jeff Penczak
Adam Stone Dead Sea Apes Black Tempest – ‘Dataland’ (Cardinal Fuzz / Feeding Tube Records / 29 January 2021)
Various Artists – ‘Stay Holy: Sonic Attack at Liverpool Psych Fest’ (2015)
