The Crystal Method – Vegas

I got this for 50¢ at Tunes in Hoboken. It was cheap because the cover was busted. I feel like I got my money’s worth, at least.

When I was listening to a lot of drum’n’bass and garage in high school I was using it as a study aid more than anything else. Traits that might irritate me as an active listener (repetitiveness, atonality, samey songs) were things that helped me focus on my work. By contrast, this is what I’d call “album-oriented dance music”. Rather than the build-drop-repeat format, the melodies, rhythms, and tones evolve over the songs that rarely dip under six minutes.

Big Beat was big business, with movie syncs and MTV crossovers for its short relevancy. The Crystal Method were the rare American act in that overwhelmingly European scene. I feel like I recognize “Keep Hope Alive” from something, but I can’t put my finger on what. Maybe it’s so blandly 90s that it melds with all the other big beat syncs in my mind?

Overall, this is a brash but kind of shallow record. Half of the songs feel like filler. The other half sound good in the moment, and would probably do well on the dancefloor, but they don’t stick with me after I’ve turned off the CD player. The drum samples in particular are very much of their time, with not a ton of variation between tracks. The disc is pretty, but everything else about the oversaturated photography and limp typography kind of sucks. I haven’t been able to form a meaningful connection with this album at all.

Vegas by the Crystal Method is a bad album, and I don’t like it.