Re: Reviews
Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2022 5:04 pm
Ramleh - Hole In The Heart (1987*)
*The above video is of the 2009 expanded edition, the same one I most recently listened to. For some bizarre reason, this version starts off with a whole disc of material that is, from what I can tell, completely unrelated to Hole In The Heart proper. I want to keep my review focused on the core tracks of Hole In The Heart, so to briefly address the bonus material: it failed to impress me.
Currently, I'm making the effort to go back through some of Ramleh’s discography, in an attempt to understand the hype surrounding them. I listened to a bit of their massive Awake! boxset a few weeks back; since that boxset is mostly comprised of outtakes, rarities and alternate versions of existing tracks, I felt I was missing out on the context needed to appreciate their work.
Hole In The Heart is one I see get talked about fairly often, and maybe it would’ve hit me harder had I first heard it in my twenties… except that’s exactly what happened and it didn’t resonate with me then, either.
Ramleh can certainly be credited for pioneering a [still] fairly unique ‘ambient PE’ sound, but there’s been three and a half decades of arguably better stuff since then. By the time I’d first heard of Ramleh, I’d already listened to countless others who were inspired by them; I still remember being blown away by the exponentially more obscure [though practically more attainable] works of John Lithium, who took a few cues from Ramleh, but I hardly remember anything about Ramleh's own works.
So let's clean the slate: what do I think of Hole In The Heart now?
The opening track “Spear Flowers” starts off great, but about a minute-and-a-half in it abruptly pulls a switcheroo and totally derails all the momentum it built. What a cop-out.
Following that, the title track is an annoying medley of slipshod guitar noodling and droning vocals. This is one of the rare times where my description of how a track sounds is way more interesting than what it actually sounds like.
On the flip side (literally?), I really like what they did with “Product of Fear,” and wish they’d built it up into something bigger.
It sounds like they were trying to do just that with the following track, the confusingly named “Grazing On Fear 2” (if the “product” comes before the “grazing,” isn’t that kind of like eating your own shit?): vexingly, they shit the bed halfway through the runtime. What happened? It’s like the keyboardist lost his place then panicked; crashing waves of synth textures suddenly and inexplicably devolve into little Timmy smashing on his Casio keyboard.
And then the album’s over!
I think Hole In The Heart had some cool ideas that just needed to be developed more: as it exists, it sounds like they were trying to force too many things out at once. A neat yet deeply flawed experience.
*The above video is of the 2009 expanded edition, the same one I most recently listened to. For some bizarre reason, this version starts off with a whole disc of material that is, from what I can tell, completely unrelated to Hole In The Heart proper. I want to keep my review focused on the core tracks of Hole In The Heart, so to briefly address the bonus material: it failed to impress me.
Currently, I'm making the effort to go back through some of Ramleh’s discography, in an attempt to understand the hype surrounding them. I listened to a bit of their massive Awake! boxset a few weeks back; since that boxset is mostly comprised of outtakes, rarities and alternate versions of existing tracks, I felt I was missing out on the context needed to appreciate their work.
Hole In The Heart is one I see get talked about fairly often, and maybe it would’ve hit me harder had I first heard it in my twenties… except that’s exactly what happened and it didn’t resonate with me then, either.
Ramleh can certainly be credited for pioneering a [still] fairly unique ‘ambient PE’ sound, but there’s been three and a half decades of arguably better stuff since then. By the time I’d first heard of Ramleh, I’d already listened to countless others who were inspired by them; I still remember being blown away by the exponentially more obscure [though practically more attainable] works of John Lithium, who took a few cues from Ramleh, but I hardly remember anything about Ramleh's own works.
So let's clean the slate: what do I think of Hole In The Heart now?
The opening track “Spear Flowers” starts off great, but about a minute-and-a-half in it abruptly pulls a switcheroo and totally derails all the momentum it built. What a cop-out.
Following that, the title track is an annoying medley of slipshod guitar noodling and droning vocals. This is one of the rare times where my description of how a track sounds is way more interesting than what it actually sounds like.
On the flip side (literally?), I really like what they did with “Product of Fear,” and wish they’d built it up into something bigger.
It sounds like they were trying to do just that with the following track, the confusingly named “Grazing On Fear 2” (if the “product” comes before the “grazing,” isn’t that kind of like eating your own shit?): vexingly, they shit the bed halfway through the runtime. What happened? It’s like the keyboardist lost his place then panicked; crashing waves of synth textures suddenly and inexplicably devolve into little Timmy smashing on his Casio keyboard.
And then the album’s over!
I think Hole In The Heart had some cool ideas that just needed to be developed more: as it exists, it sounds like they were trying to force too many things out at once. A neat yet deeply flawed experience.