Sly amp the Family Stone - Theres a Riot Goin on Mlps (15 tracks) +Album Reviews

Portrait of the artist as a train wreck

mediafreak | 02/21/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This one of the most harrowing albums ever made, a brilliant musician caught in the transitional stage of losing almost everything to drugs but before his creativity imploded. File under Skip Spence's Oar, Big Star's SisterLovers, Syd Barrett and Brain Wilson's Smile-era flame-outs. The basic deal is Sly deconstructing a more polished album by substituting his own sloppier instrumental overdubs, narcotic vocals, mental wanderings. Easily one of the greatest albums of the 1970's, it's like a slow motion audio trainwreck you won't want to turn away from.

Essential dub funk but also a audio document of drug-induced brain damage.

Many of us from my generation experimented with drugs and came through it.

This is the sad, cautionary tale told in beautiful music of one of our greatest musical lights being extinguished."

Still checkin eachother out... heeeeeyyyyy....

R. Rodriguez | 03/22/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"i finally found this on a beautiful gatefold lp at the mighty "my mind's eye" in lakewood. it was a very good day indeed, because this is one of the greatest albums ever recorded."

The dark side of remembered Boomer paradise

silt | Portland Maine, USA | 11/20/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"If you've never heard Sly & the Family Stone before, start with Stand! and Fresh. For many, that will be all they ever want. This album is Stand! turned inside up and upside in by a narcotic, gun toting haze. Not for the faint of heart.

Thing is, it's also very, very good.

To make things perfectly clear: Sly was drugged out of his bleepin' mind when he recorded Riot. It's testament to his enormous talent he managed to get out an album so funky most musicians would give their left nut to have done one track from it. "Luv N' Haight" is a damning indictment of the Summer of Love. (As well as a fine punning title, though if he started luv as a spelling I'll knock a star off!) "Poet" has one of the deepest funk grooves ever recorded. "Thank You for Talkin' to Me Africa" is the deliriously joyous "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)" slammed into the mud and shot up. It's also the standout track and the core of the album. It is inexorable downward pressure. It doesn't go anywhere, it starts you low and keeps you there for the duration as guitar and organ flourishes waft in and out as phantoms of his (then recent) happy past. The Velvet's "Heroin" romanticizes the rush and crash waves of using; this track is the grinding reality.

The sound of the album is sometimes frustratingly murky. His vocals are slurred. All part of the package."

Classic

Bill Your 'Free Form FM Handi Cyber | Mahwah, NJ USA | 04/28/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"A lot can happen in a few months, and in 1969, it did. Sly and the Family Stone released Stand! and followed the happy buzz all the way to Woodstock, and for a very little while, it seemed like dreams of hippie shared land and resources, black and white together, all the hopes of the 1960s were about to come true.

Then came Manson and Altamont, and soon, it was over. More people were listening to the panthers than to "We Shall Overcome." Smack replaced pot and LSD. Drugs for insight became drugs for numbing.

All that now means very little, and if there was a riot going on in 1971, this means absolutely nothing now. We are too jaded and diverse in 2010 for 1969 OR 1971 to happen again.

The dark hand that does reach into 2010 is this album. Sly Stone took out all the fireworks of his music going back to 1968's Dance to the Music, and substituted a flat, murky nod using the beat box from an organ. If he had sung the theme to Woody Woodpecker through the album, the drum box alone would make Riot essential.

Of course he didn't: If Dance To The Music was 10pm Friday night, Riot is 6am Sunday morning, stoned, hung over after the dance, money spent, wondering around cotton mouthed for cold coffee and toast.

This all counts now because the album's bad mood still floods into hip hop, trip hop, and more progressive dance music. Sly's ability to turn the tables, when the 1969 tables were turning themselves, threads into Tricky, Portishead, all kinds of dark electronica.

Tricky and Porishead got the genius of Sly in that within the electronic beat shell of Riot were all the vocals and instrumental dynamics that made Family Stone and its father matter in the first place. Too few modern students of this album remember that--which is why this album is still unsurpassed for invention.

No folks, the era is over: there is no riot going on. Which makes it all the more amazing that almost forty years on, this long ago snapshot still so much matters.

"

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