Lo-Fidelity Allstars Warming Up The Brain Farm: The Best Of

I never listened to Lo Fidelity Allstars when they were actively making music and being buzzy. A little internet research tells me that they are now completely forgotten and hugely influential. Must have been a pretty amazing few albums they made. I like electronic music, and would go ahead and say I love it if I didn't feel like I was lining myself up to be crucified for all the shit I don't know about it. I would, however, like to call a moratorium on describing every electronic artist who had some time in the sun and made at least one decent full length a legend who continues to make the world go 'round, even as the world had unjustly decided to ignore it. Listening now, I can hear that Lo Fidelity Allstars were influential and were influenced. Sounds like a nice body of work to resurrect in a nifty best of, which Skint Records have happily done.

Another moratorium I'd like to call in retrospective electronic music interweb scribbling is subgenre dogma. It took me a while to wrap my head around electronic music until I could feel confident hazarding a guess at what to call another distinct four on the floor confection, and a while longer to listen and enjoy without overthinking it. In my lost years, I decided anything linked to Big Beat or Fat Boy Slim was beneath me, which probably explains part of my lack of exposure to Lo Fidelity Allstars, as well as a good dose of ignorance. I've since figured out that while some electronic genres have very specific parameters and moods, just as often these designations are catchalls to shove distinct artists into pretty little boxes for consumers, and how an artist is marketed doesn't necesarily speak to their quality. I still wince when I hear Norman Cook's work pop up in teen comedies from the early oughts, but I feel foolish for turning my back on the Chemical Brothers, whose work I later found myself enjoying. Eh.

Lo Fidelity Allstars were, if nothing else, sassy. There's a lot of cheek in these tunes, with their unrestrained breaks, exaggerated fuzzy funk basslines, copious sampled exclamations, and unhinged, druggy vocal rants. It's all rather great for a certain loud, drunken atmosphere... not clubs, really, with their demand for the hyperperfected sounds of deep tracks or top 40 oblivion, but more like a rowdy bar one enjoys. Lo Fidelity Allstars were probably among the best around the turn of the millennium at producing pub tracks. Their name refers not to the sensitive asshole recording on a 4 track in his pantry vibe, but the tendency to use a fair amount of low fidelity analog equipment, and that creates a good, non perfectionist feel for beer drinking and shouting to, where the boundary between rock and electronic energy become blurred. Sure, the Manchester bands of the early 90s did something like that a decade earlier, and the Rapture do it better now, but there's no real diminishing value in this kind of electronic music for dudes who like to drink and rock, it's always good in the right setting.

In a more sober, quiet setting, the songs here are about fifty/fifty between annoying and really impressive. Vision Inscision plays like a slovenly, jovial friend of Moby's Go. I would point out that Dark Is Easy has an impressively downbeat emotion and complexity if I didn't feel that the song title was mocking me for thinking that, but never mind, it is dark, it is good, and I don't care if it is easy. The track that gives this collection its subtitle, Warming Up The Brain Farm, features mad scientist vocals and cuts spinning around undeniable loops and, yes, massive breaks. Warming Up The Brain Farm: The Best Of may not be a mind boggling rebirth of one of the most important acts ever, but it is a refreshing reminder (or, in my case, true introduction) of a group that was at best a fairly amazing and uncommonly loose electronic name, and at worst a lot of fun to drink and jump with.