Living Colour
Collide0scope

Like a post-pop art exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art on Broadway. "Before and beyond Rage Against the Machine, blending hip-hop, punk, and metal rock into an explosion of dark energy" (source www.ticketone.it), there was a group that had made the word "contamination" the flag to wave to manifest their evolved and utopian approach.

An intersection of distant styles and sounds, derived from post-cyberpunk, developed in a path rich in contaminations and experiments between media influences and new artistic trends, continuous oscillations between archaic and future, between digital and post-punk: this is the new album by Coloured.
Vaguely bohemian hints evoked by vocal lines (finally) matching the structures built by the solid yet provocative rhythmic section act as resistance to the futuristic calls of the samples and functionally digital sounds of Reid's guitar.

Living Colour openly declare in this album (but evidence could also be found in previous albums) their love for the Beatles, both with the daring cover of "Tomorrow Never Knows" and with explicit clichés typical of the Fab Four, such as the singing in the verses of "In Your Name" that faithfully echoes the accent of "Come Together", albeit with a substantially different text in terms of metrics and themes.

The album is strongly influenced by the brilliant bassist Doug Wimbish, who has replaced former Muzz Skilling since "Stain", always attentive to new techniques to express his abilities on his Warwick, whipped by a continuous and incessant hammering of slap 'n' stick. Will Calhoun is - perhaps - the most modern drummer around. He is not a metal drummer, he is not jazz, he is not rock (and I mention genres just to make you understand what I mean - note by Mr_Iko), he is simply "all these things together" with the addition of being also a human drum machine when the song requires loops and drums programming.

Slightly intimidated by Doug's personality, Vernon Reid, known to his fans also for his solo work "Mistaken Identity" (almost unnoticed by us) has reduced his excursions on the keyboards of his Hamer, Parker, and Ovation to more dedicated and incisive research of licks suitable to highlight the work on the groove carried out by the rhythm section. The result is a less dazzling but more successful application of technique and realization of melodic spirit to the constitutive needs of the songs.

The voice is finally (as I was saying) on par with the instrumentalists: the annoying strains present in previous works, which sounded almost like necessary decorations of an external body made with the ultimate aim of making the songs pleasant to a larger audience, are no longer noticeable.

I was looking for the energy of Stain. Or the imaginative and metaphysical experimentation applied to rock in Time's Up. I found both, even if one necessarily tends to reduce the other to enhance its own dimension. I found a band perhaps still searching for its place in the musical universe.