Search - Rise Robots Rise :: Rise Robots Rise

The tragedy of the uncommons

Jonathan W. King | 07/15/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I remember buying this back in the day, and thinking to myself: these guys will rule the world. It didn't work out that way. This debut album sold enough for TVT Records to put some more lavish production values into the (very good) follow-up "Spawn", but after that...static and silence.And this is really just a horrible fate. Rise Robots Rise was a band *way* ahead of its time. You can listen to this CD today and you would have no clue it was originally released 11 years ago. The problem, as always, is how to categorize it? These days you can call anything "alternative" if it isn't Top-40, hip-hop, or country, so I guess you could call this alternative. But that doesn't tell you anything.What this music is is *intricate*. It is one of the only contemporary music albums I have heard where I was fairly sure that the band knew what every track was doing and why it was there, and there are many, many tracks, and they are all different and they all need to be there. If you have heard anything from this album, it is probably "If I only knew", which was the single that got some airplay, and then the ultimate back-handed compliment from the establishment: Tom Jones covered the sucker. No, I'm not making this up. That act itself was something like a Kiki andHerb act of bizarreness and did not really help Jones "update" his image, but I still wonder who it was who realized what a work of genius that song was and somehow convinced Tom Jones to give it a whirl.It's a strange world."

The first three songs [rock], but....

Robert Jackson | Costa Mesa, California USA | 04/19/2003

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This is one of the groups that had the misfortune of being a few years ahead of the Internet boom, because they probably would've had a good buzz through the Internet's community. Anyway...The first three songs are definitely classics, going through a mellow jazzy groove from All Sewn Up, to rock-funk, but afterwards, well, the first few songs are too good for their own good. It seems to progressively lose some steam. At the price, I definitely recommend checking it out. I posted this reviewbecause I'm listening to it, and I'm digging 'People Get Ready" Basically, buy the album for the first three AMAZING songs, especially if you can get it for under 5.00."

Really a pity...

dharmacrush | Portland, OR USA | 06/03/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"...that this group came up with this album when they did as they were a little too soon for the masses. their ingenuity and fusion of different music styles are the stuff that have made groups such as morcheeba and gus gus the successes they are. the rise robots rise sound, which is catchy and infectous should appeal to a wide variety of people with it originality, because, we all know, that commercialized overproduced pop music isn't original, right?"