Rafter - Sex Death Cassette
I thought, with nineteen tracks this is going to be quite an album, I’m going to be sitting for ages listening to it, but each track is fairly short, and fairly unpleasant.
There are very few tracks on ‘Sex Death Cassette’ that can actually be considered songs. There is the opener ‘Zzzpenchant’, which may sound like a song, is not a very good one. The brass solo is good as a steady beat but elsewhere the husky yet gentle and dull vocals are hidden under the raspy beat. Likewise, ‘Sleazy Sleepy’ is dreary and has some confusing harmonies, ‘Candy Sprinkles’ is insistent with the repeated rhythm which turns out is not all that interesting, ‘No-One Home Ever’ is fanatic about tapping, ‘Casualty Of Dance Music’ gets slightly electronic, ‘Slay Me’ is dreadful with the crashing pots and pans and back up brass and ‘Chances’ sounds like two mashed tracks built to one heck of a mess as it begins to sound a little digital. The only one that sounds completely different is the R’n’B styling of ‘Love Time Now Please’, although with the mumbles, taps and smacks, it is difficult to understand much of what is being said.
The remainder of the album is a ridiculous amount of experimental sounds. Bubbles on ‘Adventurers’, the bongs, wobbles and spaced out atmosphere of ‘Tropical’, shells and bells rapping together on ‘Kindness’, the scratching and hand claps of ‘Asking’ which also occurs among the mass of squeezes and rumbles and squeaks in ‘Cuddling Racoons’ and the country horse shoe effect of ‘Casualty Of BOC’. As you can see there is a huge amount of variation, experimentation and alterations within this album.
The vocals I wish I could say were better but are not. For much of the record they are buried beneath a mass of instrumentals and crashes such as on ‘Thunderclap’ and ‘How To And Why’. The bad language of ‘Breathing Room’ was completely uncalled for and makes no sense and has no real meaning to the “song”. Then there is the repetition of “I love you most of all, but most of all I do” in ‘I Love You Most Of All’. The vocals are whispered, uneasy and how anyone thought this track, or any of the other tracks on this release would sell a record is beyond me.