Full English Breakfast - Candy in Weightlessness

  by John Clarkson

published: 12 / 1 / 2013

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Review

With its front cover photograph of an astronaut, mouth agape, passed out asleep as his spacecraft orbits the Earth, one might expect, before playing it, something unusual from ‘Candy in Weightlessness’. And indeed that is exactly what one gets with this second album from Full English Breakfast, the project of Aberdeen University graduate, electronic musician and one-man band, Alvin Spetz. The opening track, ‘Bubbleworks’, sets out a blueprint for the much of the first half of the album, combining an underlay of spiralling, whooshing beats with chiming noises; sudden grinding stabs of techno, and delighted fairground-style screams. Other tracks share the same raucousness and follow in a similar pattern, finishing in a very different place from where they started from, and taking a seemingly scattered melange of sounds and against-the-odds pulling them together. The quirky third track, ‘Open Your Mind’, is particularly effective at this. Its insistent, poppy tune throws into its mix a brief disco number; has Spetz chanting the title over and over using various voice distorters, and concludes in a blasting flurry of trumpets. ‘Bedrooms’, which comes at the mid-point of the album, however, moves away from the exuberance of the other tracks. With its floating, dreamy tune, and sample about buying a house of between one and four bedrooms, Spetz has come up with something that is oddly almost balladic in tone with this track. The next track, the nine-minute ‘Music for Giftshops’ starts out as an eerie, industrial number, with cranking and doom-ridden rhythms, before shifting gradually into a torrent of epic-sounding ambience, and finally concluding in its last minute on a note of gentle euphoria. ‘Candy in Weightlessness’ is an album that so off the spectrum that it has to be listened to in an appropriate frame of mind. It can come across, depending on one’s mood, as in equal measure breathtakingly brilliant or absolutely infuriating. Caught on the right moment or day, one is left in nothing but complete admiration of Full English Breakfast and Spetz for his originality and imagination.

Track Listing:-

1 Bubbleworks
2 Second Hand Poet
3 Open your mind
4 3 before A
5 Ivor's Noodles
6 Bedrooms
7 Music For Giftshops
8 Ice 9
9 Thought Bubbles

Label Links:-

http://www.theinternetatemysoul.co.uk/