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 Travoltas - Club Nouveau [Roadrunner Records - 2001]Dutch surf punk-rockers Travoltas started to experiment on this album. Club Nouveau is a weird mixture of punkrock, surf music (Beach Boys), pop and electronics. As weird as it may sound, Travoltas make it work on a couple of songs. The first track 'Sugarride' is a happy punkrock song with a catchy refrain, a couple of synth parts and Beach Boys vocal-melodies. Personally I think this is the best track on the album. Another good one is 'Another Day', which is not as punky as 'Sugarride', but Travoltas instead use a nice hip-hop/trip-hop beat. The vocoder in the song is a little bit cheasy and reminds me of that awfull Cher song, but the refrain is really catchy. More good stuff can be found in 'Do It Again', which is their new single. A catchy punkrock song with a small dose of electronics and a catchy refrain. With 'City Toxic' we get another happy punkrock song. A great track and one of the albums highlights. A not so really outstanding track is 'Beautiful Plastic'. Travoltas let us hear a popsong with an irritating 80's drum-machine. It sounds like an old disco-hit and maybe they liked it this way, but I think it's a bit too much cheese. With the track 'Dreams' we get a decent balled, but at the end we get 4 minutes of playground-noises and guitar-effects, this is a bit to long for me. Less outstanding is 'Last Thing In The World', the song starts with a melody which reminds me of R&B-act Destiny's Child, and that's no compliment. When the guitars kicks in, the song get's better, but overall this song is ruined because of the horrid drum-computer. And no, they use it again in 'Run Randy Run!'. It even has a Miami Vice like drum-computer break, which just stinks. The rest of the song is really good, especially the vocallines, but these drum-computers ruin it for me. 'Song For The Jetset' is another ballad and is not bad at all. It even has real strings in it. 'Come Down' is an upbeat track and has, in contrary to some other tracks, great use of the drum-computer because of it's slick drum'n bass alike breakbeats. It's like they bought a new drum-computer for this song. Same can be said for last track on the album. 'Break Out' has singer Perry doing a duet with female vocalist Tinihka, who has a great voice. This song is really catchy and has absolutely nothing to do with punkrock anymore. Ofcourse we get the not so secret track after a couple minutes of silence. If you like Radiohead's 'Fitter Happier', so Stephan Hawking talking with a trip-hop beat underneat it, then you will like this secret audio data.Overall I don't really know what to think of this album. Travoltas definatly have some good ideas. A lot of songs are really catchy. but sometimes there is way to much cheese in it because of the wrongly used drum-computer. They fixed this problem in the last two tracks and ofcourse it's not happening in the punkrock based songs. I think we have to see what will happen on their next record to see if they learned from their mistakes on Club Nouveau. For now I can say this album is quite good, but the band still has to learn a bit more about how to use electronics properly.   Niels van Rongen
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|  | | Travoltas - Club Nouveau | Dutch surf punk-rockers Travoltas started to experiment on this album. Club Nouveau is a weird mixture of punkrock, surf music (Beach Boys), pop and electron...
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| | | The Music of Clay Ruby & Burial H... | Over the last couple of decades Wisconsin native, Clay Ruby has been creating some of the world’s finest dark electronic music under the Burial Hex mon...
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