MP3 Download: Carbon / Silicon - Falun Gong love song
I’ve pretty much always been a fan of Mick Jones. No, not the lead singer of Foreigner. I’m speaking of course of the guitarist and sometimes vocalist of The Clash. I loved The Clash, as all true music fans should. I mostly liked Big Audio Dynamite. Hell, I even regularly listen to his wankiest project, BAD II, which, honestly, wasn’t really wanky at all.
So, in listening to Carbon / Silicon, I’ve already got a biased towards liking it purely because of Jones’ inolvement. C/S finds Jones pairing up with Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s synth bass guitarist, Tony James. The first reaction I had to hearing of this pairing was, ‘Wow, that’s a cool little collaboration they’ve got there.’ but my second reaction was: ‘Wait. I don’t know shit about Sigue Sigue Sputnik. In fact, other than that Love Missle song, I don’t think I know anything by them.’ And I’m willing to bet that’s true for most of you, too. That makes the fact that Jones is putting out new work at 52 years old truly the most thing interesting about this project.
How does it stand up, then? I’ve been following this project for about a year when I was keyed into the fact that they put a ton of demo’s up on their site for free download. That offering has been considerably slimmed down since the release of C/S’s debut, The Last Post. The point being, I’ve heard these songs (and many others that didn’t make the album) and become familiar with them over the last few months. The demos were solid, they had a little bit of fight in them, but the songs went on way too long. Like a well written, well acted and poorly edited film. You like what’s at the core, but it all needed to be tightened up and the fluff needed to be cast aside. That said, it’s hard to judge demos. They are just rough drafts after all and until you’ve heard the mastered and finalized version, you don’t really have a sense of the product that’s meant to be consumed. So, I had a nice long moment with The Last Post and the demos did the album justice, which isn’t necessarily a good thing.
Surprisingly, given Jones’ years of experimenting with synths and beats, and James’ band’s obvious love of electronic instruments, many of the tracks are rockers. Not a beep or a loop to be heard, just a classic 4 piece rock n roll setup. Guitars, bass, drums. Carbon/Silicon has more to do with the Clash’s sound than anything he’s done since he parted ways with the group in 1983.
Most of the songs on The Last Post are hooky, listenable and not easily forgotten, but as with the demos, they go on twice as long as they should. Even my favorite tracks on the album, “Caesars Palace”, “The News” and “What The Fuck”, find me eagerly waiting for the goddamn song to end!
A quick look at the credits reveals the problem: Written and Produced by Tony James and Mick Jones. Ah… the good old self-produced product. Did they “cheap out” when it came to the decision on whether not to hire a producer or was it just cockiness? The Last Post would not likely have been a great album, but the right person dictating the final product could have boosted the album from “good” to “pretty good”.
Lastly, I know that album art is a dying form, but I want to put an open offer out there to James and Jones: If you ever need some album art done again in the future, just ask me. I’ll do it for a Franklin and some autographed shit. Seriously. The graphics on your front cover aren’t only boring, but they’ve got no theme and feel like you hired your grandkids to whip something up on Photoshop. Think about it. I can be reached at Superstarcastic.com.
Label: EMI
Release Date: October 23, 2007
Rating: 6.5/10
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Comment by daniel — January 29, 2008 @ 2:12 pm
I was disappointed when I heard this, but only because I had unreasonably high expectations. Your review is dead-on; the songs are just too damn long.