Music Review: Beneath The Icy Floe Projekt Label Sampler (Original Version)

I brought this one up recently in talking about something else. Patrick Ogle plays on this album, which I had in High school and found on Amazon for less than a dollar. I was commenting how not only is he now a bad, bad writer- but mysteriously he and another one time associate of mine, the author Rick Moody, have become mysteriously nearly identical in bad writing. As soon as a thing is being born it is being annihilated. This is true of the arts as much as anything else, or even more so. This album is a collection from the "etherial" gothic label Projekt Records, which at the time specialized in bands from southern California and Arizona. They were slower and very into delay and echo effects. When It first came out and I had it senior year in high school it sounded like a kind of cutting edge and very contemporary sound- or the coming sound of the future. The label had existed in some form or other for ten years when this album was released, but it felt very current in 1996. I was going to school outside of Boston at the time and Boston local clubs had a lot of similar sounding bands like, say, Opium Den. That was a future that never came. Apparently, the reason which Patrick Ogle explained to me was this music never sold. I hear it a little differently now and days. Human Drama is on there, that was an unholy bad band. I will see this though these bands had succeeded at sounding melancholy and atmospheric, but it was never anything that would cross over into larger audiences. I recall Patrick saying that Love Spirals Downward had one CD that sold somewhere in the range of 15,000 copies, and that Projekt label owner Sam Rosenthal's band Black Tape For a Blue Girl would only sell a few thousand copies each. Around the same time I was heavily into Psychic TV, and I will say this, since I get more hits when I trash Genesis P. Orridge. None of these bands aged as badly as a lot of the Psychic TC excrement has and Sam Rosenthal has yet to become an old man with breast implants. However, you could probably throw on a H.I.M. album and it would be better then this album. There's a lengthy experimental track by an artist I don't know much about called Alio Die called "Global Construction" that I've always been sort of a fan of. On the subject of Rick Moody and Patrick Ogle, rock criticism now annoys me. My approach to blogging is to through whatever out there and then go with what seems to stick, so since some of the metal stuff has done as well as it has and the thing about Psychic TV did relatively well, I'm stuck writing band reviews until there is more "William Wheaton" name recognition. People check on here periodically to see if the Canadian black metal band Akitsa are neo-nazis, which is apparently a false rumor. It may get scrapped soon because this pilot of a blogtalk radio show I did that i wash't paying any attention to got a good number of hits without any promotion, and that was mostly politics/current events type material from a libertarian perspective. So I may be about to ditch that whole angle completely.