Thievery Corporation
The Cosmic Game

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The Cosmic Sòla. There are records that, at a certain point, set trends, impose a style that is then promptly repeated and flaunted in all kinds by various clone groups, lazy DJs, and Falsely Free Radios which decree their triumph and mark the territory for the following months. This has happened with these Thievery Corporation, who after two records that passed "with a whiff" of originality (real pioneers of the cosmic-lounge genre, if you'll permit the term) come out with this "the cosmic game" that I would venture to define as bland and boring. In short, more "The cosmic sòla" than something else. It's true that The Cosmic Game represents an attempt by Thievery Corporation to create "a real album" in the most classic sense of the term and nothing can be criticized about the conceptual homogeneity of this work, strongly influenced - as is easily deduced from the cover art to a title like "Doors Of Perception" - by the psychedelic culture of the '60s.

But the good intentions, however, end here. The rest becomes a carnival of fragmented and heterogeneous songs without bite that dabble in dub-reggae ("Amerimacka") whichalwaysworks, to the bossa (agaain?! Again, again?) of the triptych "Eternal Ambition", "Sol Tapado" and "Pela Janela" which is sotrendyidmntyoutell. Forward with the soft-molasses-lounge of "The Time We Lost Our Way" echoing the Style Council of times gone by up to the Bollywood stew of "Shiva" and another 4 which, whether you mention the titles or not, makes no difference. An album that can simply be defined with: PRE-DICT-A-BLE. Predictable are the vocal contributions of the various guests/singers (mind you: each in his genre like in the stereotypes of jokes where the black person speaks with B, the German with K etc. Here too each sings his genre, one doing African, another Indian, the other Portuguese lest David Byrne sings something different from what he's been doing for over twenty years and I close parentheses). Predictable are the sounds that "must" always be cooler to appeal to as many trendy locales as possible and to make a great impression on some shop assistant downtown displaying the CD in the lounge sector among D&G shoes and Meschino perfumes, vulgarly chewing gum asking you: "mbè, what’s up? Isn't it fine?" No, my dear. Everything is desperately fine: all beautiful, all super chic, all danceable-but-not-too-much that makes it vulgar?

Predictable in its coldness and cleanliness, where the only thing missing is precisely the soul, the warmth, the sweat, the humanity, in a word, THE EMOTIONS which here are, in fact, shamefully absent. A record that will be forgotten in no time but which will make converts even among the "in" dance clubs of the big cities, clusters of sad humanity compressed in swaying movements of people branded from head to toe but without soul, without warmth, and without emotions. A humanly useless record: a horrifying recycling of ideas already used as seasoning in better dishes (much tastier and especially much more nutritious).