Send "Meat Beat Manifesto " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Sputnikmusic |
 Meat Beat Manifesto have been releasing quality electronic albums since the late eighties. Over their twenty -year career they have constantly pushed their sound in new directions – from their twitchy beginnings to the pounding dub beats of their last album, they have never stayed in one place for too long. That ever-changing formula has always been a part of this band’s appeal, and it had never hurt their high level of quality – that was until now. Answers Come in Dreams continues Meat Beat Manifesto’s constant push for new ideas, but this time the end result might be a little bit hard for fans to accept. Regardless of Meat Beat Manifesto’s direction, the one constant has always been the huge beats and thunderous bass, but they’ve finally become a casualty of the band’s constant evolution. The man behind the band, Jack Dangers, has decided to strip the music down to its bare minimum and deliver an album full of chill electronic ambience. Answers Come in Dreams is a dark, sparse album that shares more in common with Aphex Twin’s ambient outputs or Dead Cities-era The Future Sound of London than anything from its own discography. The pounding beats have been reduced to a laid-back pace that would barely even register on a BPM scale, and the punchy bass has been replaced by a deep rolling bottom end that blankets just about everything (The Orb’s Orbus Terrarum is a good reference point). Over that rhythmic foundation is a minimal collection of samples, found sounds, and cyclic synth noises that move in and out of each track with regularity. The problem is that, although well executed, the songs on Answers Come in Dreams lack the flair that is required to make this type of music work. The big names of the ambient genre are all well-known for their individual styles and quirky nuances that make their albums the interesting pieces that they are, and this album is missing that. Instead of creating any kind of real ambience or atmosphere, Answers Come in Dreams feels like exactly what it is – a collection of digital noises over various beats without any real soul or presence. If The Orb makes you feel like you’re floating through the clouds and The Future Sound of London drag you through auditory landscapes, then Answers Come in Dreams sits you in a dimly lit room to watch paint dry while coming down from a trip… not a lot of fun but not too bad of a time either....full text |
| 411mania |
| Never one to shy away from musical evolution and reinvention, Meat Beat Manifesto’s Jack Dangers has once again shunned conventional wisdom for the band’s latest release. Over the years MBM has embraced a multitude of genres from techno to hip-hop, jungle to rock with even a little dubstep thrown in, so it should come as no surprise to learn that once again Dangers has moved in a new direction. Answers Come In Dreams is a stripped down album of minimalist, industrial electro beats, though it must be said, even the beats are few and far between. Opening track, “Luminol”, is 6 minutes of almost nothing. A slow electronic whirring grinds away at your soul, punctuated only by the lethargic one-two of snare and bass drum. A pause after 2 minutes and on it plods, like a sullen teenage metronome, carrying on only because it has been forced to. Less than 3 minutes into the entire album and you’re already crying out for something to happen. It’s not until “M.Y.C”, that the album appears to wake from its self-imposed slumber and even that comes after a full 3 minutes of more minimalist electro warbling. Finally there is a beat worthy of the name, and there, just after 4 minutes is something approaching a melody. This may all appear to be overly picky and fastidious but it is necessary to understand just how far back the sound has been stripped. Something which Dangers is well aware of, “I don’t feel like this is a new direction, it’s just an extension of my sound. Maybe it’s more minimal than previous records – that was a conscious decision because I am making a video for each song more or less.” And therein lies both the answer and the rub, by concentrating on the video as much as the audio Dangers has, perhaps inadvertently, created an album that should not be listened to so much as watched. The presence of a visual accompaniment would no doubt add something to those tracks that are so desperately in need of enhancing, as well as embellishing those that were quite clearly designed to be the score to something larger. “Waterphone” and “Token Words”, for example, have a particularly cinematic feel to them. Though it is a difficult album to get into, there are rewards hidden within for those brave enough, or foolhardy, to persevere with it. “# Zero” is the audio equivalent of epilepsy inducing cartoons, all fast paced electro-beeping (think R2-D2 on speed) layered over pounding, throbbing bass and enough random yet sequential numbers to have the cast of Lost begging for mercy. “Zenta!” too is a highlight, sounding dirty and psychotic in equal measure. Dark and protruding, intense and dramatic, this is the track you’d hear in your head should you ever have an ‘episode’. It’s a feeling that is not uncommon in the final quarter of the album. “Please” in particular is a visceral, industrial assault on the senses yet it is laced with soothing, otherworldly synth sounds that calm you before the final, brutal attack finishes you off, left to wonder what might have been if only the album started as well as it finished....full text |
| Fearnet |
| Many years before it was trendy to kick around the term “industrial” or “techno” when describing electronic music with an experimental edge, driving beats and underground club appeal, Jack Dangers was twiddling knobs, patching cables and mangling samples to create dark, twisted soundscapes under the handle Meat Beat Manifesto. This year, Jack has assembled a new collection of haunting, infectious beats, mind-altering melodies and futuristic soundbites for MBM's latest project Answers Come In Dreams – which takes the sound down an even more mysterious path, blurring the lines between sound and vision so far as to produce an eccentric sci-fi/pop culture media mashup for virtually every track on the album. I took a look and a listen, and I've got the full breakdown below the fold. Read on to learn more, and witness some of the bizarro audio-visual experimentation coming from MBM's mad science lab......full text |
Meat Beat Manifesto lyrics
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