21 Aug 2009 // A review by lukefitzmaurice
With any experiment, there are always going to be some things that work out great, and others that don’t really go down so well. Therefore, with any experimental album, the same is bound to happen. 'Great News For The Modern Man', the debut offering from former TrinityRoots member Riki Gooch, is a perfect example of such an album. Some of the tracks are brilliant, but others seem, well, a little bit too strange for my liking.

The album mixes elements jazz, roots, blues, beats and soul, with varying elements of success. A few of the songs, 'Sun Again' and 'Coq Au Vin' for example, were fantastic. 'Coq Au Vin' in particular I really enjoyed, it reminded me of Sola Rosa’s latest album, and in my opinion is the best track on the album. Then there were a few songs, such as 'Sambaskool Dropout', which I felt could have been great, but fell short for some reason.

Then there were the songs that were just plain weird. The album has four tracks titled 'Interlude', all less than one minute long, and all of which seemed to me to break up the continuity of the album. I don’t quite know what Gooch was trying to achieve by having these songs littered throughout the record, but I personally felt the album would have been better had they been left out altogether. The same could be said about the one minute intro to the album, which I felt was also a little strange.

If I was to describe the album in one word, I would say cluttered, which is probably the reason I was slightly disappointed. Taken without the strange intro and the four interludes, this probably would have been a very good album, but it could have been far better had Gooch kept things a little more simple.

Great News For The Modern Man
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Eru Dangerspiel is a mesmeric group led by former TrinityRoots' drummer and master percussionist Riki Gooch. Gooch guides a stellar line-up of New Zealand's finest musicians, performing dirty, bottom-heavy funk and psychedelic rhythm and blues. Since the release of the exciting album Great News For the Modern Man, Eru Dangerspiel has performed with everything from a 36-piece choir at the Auckland Town Hall, a 29 piece band on stage at Rippon, to selected wickedly catchy sound system sets, with special guest “cousins”.

2009's sold-out, critically acclaimed, mind-warping show left punters hankering for more and elicited ecstatic responses from many who cited it as the show of the year. The band featured on the CD and 5.1 Surround Sound DVD from that show includes soul legend Whirimako Black, multi-instrumentalist/composer Jonathan Crayford, Laughton and Fran Kora, Anna Coddington, Mara TK (Electric Wire Hustle), Parks (Ladi6), Chip Matthews, Julien Dyne and Isaac Aesili (all Opensouls), Joe Lindsay, Scott Towers and Toby Laing (all Fat Freddy’s Drop), Mike Fabulous (The Black Seeds Lord Echo), Will Ricketts (The Phoenix Foundation), Ross Burge (The Mutton Birds), Ned Ngatae (Dimmer), Submariner (Che Fu, The Turnaround), Lewis McCallum, Olga Gryniewicz, Nathan Haines and The Dangerspiel Community Municipal City Choir.

"Bringing together a vibrant mixture of local musicians, more than just a celebration of band leader Riki Gooch’s idiosyncratic compositions - the Eru Dangerspiel concert was a celebration of New Zealand's musical community and its intimate connection with audiences across the country. Viva La Musica!" - Martyn Pepperell

Visit the muzic.net.nz Profile for Eru Dangerspiel

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