TR-i
No World Order Lite

I feel it necessary to preface this by stating that in reviewing this "lightened" version of "No World Order," I will not concern myself with expressing how much, or in what way, the revisited tracks resemble or differ from the previous year's album versions. This is because I do not find it fair (and useful to the review itself) to make references to a product that I have simply advised against, with words and a rating. Therefore, I will try to stay in line with the current project, keeping myself as "light" as possible.

"No World Order Lite" is a very sophisticated, intricate, and apparently ambitious work, yet it's pop. Its author touches on industrial in the supersonic "Day Job" and dream pop in the closing "Fever Broke," but it has an all-pop radio, even traditional taste and foundation. Thus, the "Lite" version, in the eternal game of the chicken and the egg, could be speculated to have been born even before the "heavy" version, but I have not been given any such information. The fact remains that once compacted, restored, recomposed, revised, the songs of "No World Order Lite" all slide quite smoothly.

It favors sung choruses and rapped verses in a style that has virtually no relevance to the rap of those times (from which one might infer that the artist is not a true electronic musician or one of those pure DJ-gurus), and instead recalls the metrics and approaches of the '80s. In the music, it seems to rely on certain soul-pop to derive black music ("Love Thing"), chill (the not exceptional "Time Stood Still" and the good "Proactivity"), and the dream pop of the aforementioned "Fever Broke." Chill are also the verses of the initial "Worldwide Epiphany," a very successful experiment, interspersed with prelude and chorus guitars. The rock is solemn with a few of its effects in the good "Word Made Flesh."

I believe the best track is the rap of "Fascist Christ," which boasts a scathing/screamed/anything-but-black chorus, with just too many pig grunts, while the worst, or perhaps simply the least current, is indeed the title track, a rather unpresentable rap where instead of pigs, a family of dolphins tries to apologize insistently (but in their language) for the ugliness of this song.

A work, as we said, of pop music that might have been pure avant-garde in those years, and which still has its reason today, if it weren't for the greater communicative impact or the personal taste of its creator to follow the path of rap rather than song. And certain things inevitably age sooner and worse than others, that's for sure.