Bran Van 3000
Glee

THE REVIEW

Glee, in other words how to achieve perfection in pop by uniting all possible opposites.
Glee, in other words 1998 Odyssey in Popular-Music.

Hardcore, folk, reggae, jungle, house, post-rock, techno blend, and a profound hip-hop culture acts as the glue with the aim of fabricating a modern/contemporary artifact whose goal is to climb the charts and prepare the dandy for the third millennium: an era in which the need for the dandy, for those who know how to live life with style, will no longer be felt.
And Jamie Di Salvio is more than aware of it, he is almost haunted by these future visions and to ward them off, he takes refuge in a commune of his own idea that brings together musicians of all kinds: soul singers and reggae b-boys, guitarists and other hardcore musicians, DJs and producers, in short, the more, the merrier. And in this place outside time and space, all together they create, create, and create until reaching the masterpiece, the pinnacle of their possibilities. Here is Glee, an album simultaneously imbued with sacredness and nihilist fury, meditation and rage, schizophrenic poetry and disillusionment. A record with a solid theoretical structure and rare beauty. Truly a screamadelic result that unfolds for almost an hour of pure sublimation: starting from the abstract hip-hop (almost a lustre ahead of the genre's explosion) of the initial Gimme Sheldon which mixes vaudeville, commercial jingles, and nu-jazz, to the concluding acoustic Mama Don’t Smoke where Di Salvio's alien project seems to be defeated and takes refuge in an ancestral blues-folk.

In the middle, thousands and thousands of brilliant and psychotic cues: pop, rap, soul, ambient, and techno that come together to give life to the pop hit Drinking In L.A. or the restless trip-hop of Afrodiziak or even the post-modern swing mixed with downtempo of Supermodel. But the absolute peak, the track that will remain in history is Rainshine: an improbable fusion of black-folk hardcore and raggamuffin of unprecedented pathos. Wonderful! A piece that definitively catapults Bran Van 3000 into the Olympus and Glee into the history of music.