Hasselhoff Press Reviews

Hasselhoff - A Concept Album Too Far? (from Disco Mantra - April 2004)

a new dawn...after the dramatic and some may say unexpected success of the knight's in satans service album, many were asking the question 'what is the future of the kettlecup corporation?'

I met jam factory executive pindar at one of their agri-business seminars late last summer - about the same time the factory had to acquire an extra pressing plant just to keep up with demand for the knights album. After sharing a few cinzanos, he took me into a back room where some men in overalls seemed to be welding oscilloscopes together and pointed out a gigantic map of the world covering an entire medium sized wall. Through the smoke I could make out thousands of different coloured pins.

'Each pin represents a sale. Each colour an album. What concerns me is that even if we disregard the oceans there are huge areas of the world where people just aren't buying our records. For example, not one person in Uzbekistan has purchased the kettlecup is dead album and sales are sluggish throughout the entire central asian region. I spent a lot of time wondering just what it is that makes these people tick. I mean, how do we penetrate their culture? Then I slowly realised that one person already has and all we need to do is surf in their wake.'

I took another slug of cinzano.

'Which one person in the world would be adored equally by, say a travelling spoon salesman from the bay of bengal, a yugoslav melon farmer who cuts his own hair or an umemployed VDU operator from the backstreets of khartoum? Who's the champion of the innocents? Who is the man who does not exist?'

'Michael Knight?'

'That's right. Michael Knight!'

a concept album too far...a haze surounds what happened at the jam factory during the following months, and speculation was rife in the punk house fanzines. Cabinet took up lucrative DJ work and was working on a mix album, Cris Cola aka Black Chap was arrested for fighting on a petrol station forecourt and there were rumours that Money was working on a golf album, 18 tracks of self indulgent double gatefold hell.

I met Money last September at a fundraiser for some kids charity at Chorley's prestigous Duxbury Golf course. He said he was there to record 'the inspirational sound of golf swings' and many of the golfers seemed to be trying to get him ejected by security. I later spotted him trying to feed a pelican a disregarded beefburger. This was about the time people started to say it was all over for the kettlecup corporation.

Here's what I recorded on my dictaphone: 'I've always been fascinated by golf. I mean I've never actually played the game, but golf courses offer an oasis of tranquility and natural beauty, often set amongst the worst imaginable kind of urban sewer. Look around, there's no drunkards being sick everywhere, no pawnbrokers, no wanton street violence, but it's all there, just 100 yards beyond those trees. A golf course, especially on a misty spring dawn, is a place removed from time and space. It's an etherial experience.'

'There is also a sinister side to golf that I am trying to explore with my album. I'm talking about the corrupt businesmen and politicians, the private security forces, the secret societies, the dress code, the lowering of the watertable and so on. It just goes to show. There's a sickness going on, even here, in the middle of paradise.'

blacklash...over christmas the press was full of speculation of Black Chap's position within the band, who had relocated to New Zealand to dig terraces into his sisters garden. Being the member of the group with demonstrable business acumen, Black had somehow aquired the rights to the bands name and objected to being in anyway associated with the Hasselhoff project despite it's secondary market potential.

Cabinet and Money resurected Los Cavalleros Lanzan, the name of their death metal circus band, though there were also several rumours questioning Cabinets enthusiasm for the Hasselhoff project, usually starting with Cabinet himself. At one DJ'ing appointment in South Wales Cabinet finished off his show by encoraging revellers to join him in burning a crate of Money's latest 'Down Like Dogs' mix CDs in the car park. His role as a DJ began to take centre stage, and as long as the money kept flooding in, he felt no pressure to release a new album. However the dream all came to an end one dark winters night, when unexpectedly a lampost collided with his sports car at 90 miles an hour.

According to Money 'Success was like a drug to Cabinet. People were offering him all this money to remix their records. He was even approached by people like Billy Joel and MC Hammer. He started talking all the time about how great his sports car was and started hanging around with this guy who spay painted question marks all over his pants and had a heliport. Then he drove his sports car into a wall or something and ended up hospitalised, he ran out of money because he could never be bothered to finish his remixes and suddenly he was no longer the hot new thing.'

'He then got heavily into smoking this Mexican mint stuff and started hanging about the house all day in these jogging pants that he'd also slept in. I remember one day Black played us some tough uncomprimising rap he'd originally written for Cabinet's Billy Joel remix. I don't know if it was the mint, but we started howling with laughter when we heard it. I think the rap was about staying true to the cause or something, whatever that meant. Anyway, it was the final insult for Black, and a couple of days later he left for New Zealand.'

master this...'It was around this time Cabinet went through his mastering phase. He thought our songs lacked a certain something. He was certainly onto something there. But rather than admit that our original batch of songs for the Hasselhoff album were just totally shit, he decided that there was essentialy nothing wrong with the songs - the problem was that they had been 'mastered' incorrectly.

'Once he had made about 40 versions of this song, each supposedly mastered in an entirely different way using the latest techniques. I had to listen to all of them, which took two whole days. They all sounded exactly the same. He had even enrolled on a mastering course at some place in town. Occasionally he would point out something like 'the snare needs more compression to dampen bleeding of the phaser effect into the left channel'. I tried to humour him, because after all he had recently nearly died in a car crash and maybe his new found love of mastering was a good outlet for post traumatic stress.

'It got out off hand when he decided to start remastering our entire back catalogue, and he even concocted some story about how someone in the far future had come across our albums and decided they would really benefit from a good workover with 25th century remastering technology. Fortunally for present day consumers, they had somehow ended up in a black hole, fallen back through time and were now available mail order.

'When I wasn't around, he'd go to our neighbours, usually while they were trying to eat their tea or mow the lawn or something, and demand their opinion on whether the echo effect on some bass drum noise was too high. They'd usually offer banalities like 'interesting' or 'yeah, sounds really cool.' Whatever it took to get him to leave the house in as short a time as possible and still maintain friendly relations. Anyway when he started this mastering course he totally lost interest. Nothing beats an educational institution, when it comes to neutralising passion for something you truly love.'

Two months later the hasselhoff album was finished along with a currently unreleased companion EP and Cabinet was applying the finishing touches to his long awaited mix album 'Music For Parties.' The jam factory technicians had just completed adapting a washing machine to house the hasselhoff hologram, the new centrepiece of the los caballeros lanzan stage show.

so what about the music...as soon as I had unwrapped the packaging I became mesmorised for several minutes by the grey vortex on the sleeve and it was with great anticipation that I inserted the freshly lasered disc into my music cube.

First up, remember the foundation,inspirational robopop celebrating the bond between members of the foundation who are not merely united by a desire to fight crime, but by love. soul machine, represents a new more mature direction for the band - with a warm yet rawcus soul sound, featuring trombone by jazz-funk legend Jason Conrad.

The most moving work on the album, another dead wife, a modern tragedy following the life of a front line lawman whose friends and family habitually get caught in the crossfire. Despite the sombre overtones, the song is surprisingly catchy and I felt guilty as I caught my self merrily tapping along as Michael Knight was agonising over his latest wife's death.

Next up, what's my name, a shout out loud electo-punk anthem, that will have you screaming 'hasselhoff. you want a little hassel.' until the early hours. An excess of energy and power that is temporarily transfered to the listener. Sensational.

21st century industrial jazz is how I'd describe 3 dead men which slowly builds up into an orgy of bongo madness and suddenly morphs into ein auto - ein computer - ein man; a germanic song with a germanic proto-techno sound, reminiscent of early house pioneer Jean Michelle Jarre taking a bath in battery acid.

I remember reading somewhere that Michael found it hard to take that KITT always received more fan mail than him. save me from myself explores the superficial world of celebrity, where a rock star's deperate cry for help is met by indifferent enquiries into his latest movie project featuring a talking car. All this is set to a sophisticated musical exploration that words cannot describe. After such soul searching it is a considerable release to hear the opening bars of let's solve some crime, a wild funk joyride that has become the jam factory trademark.

karr jam, a dark brooding trance epic, tells the sorry story of an artificial life form abandoned by it's creator and imprisoned as the star exhibit in a museum of electro-mechanical curiosities. Bitter and dejected, the life form escapes and is hell bent on a killing spree.

With automobile heaven Money and Cabinet return to their roots of grinding metal and relentless hypnotic grooves, hard driving music for a modern day duke of hazzard. In contrast true romance sees the band aping the sheek turbo pop that proved so popular in Belgian warehouses last summer.

The album plays out with the soothing computer enhanced blues of super persuit mode and I slowly begin to sense the unwelcome presence of the real world. For the last 53 minutes I have been transported to a magic place. A place that may never have existed at all, given the recent turmoil within the kettlecup corporation, and a place to which I long to return. 5 Stars.

Mark Donnely - April 2004