Underarms And Sideways

Poor offering in compArison 2t original!!

Much of the criticism of this release focuses on the lack of the usual vocal tours-de-force that one might expect on a Mortal Coil / Hope Blister release. This is clearly an exercise in something other than banal drama - it's a beautifully empty work to get utterly lost in, more akin to Phil Niblock and Mirror than Cocteau Twins et al. It's the culmination of all of the atmospheric and abstract ambitions of the TMC and THB projects. I don't like the 'Sideways' disc as much because the more techno-y approach to minimalism rarely works for me.

While the other reviewer commented on the lack of songs in this album, my expectations once I'd read the sleeve notes, was that this would be an instrumental/sampling kind of album. And I was not disappointed.In fact, this is a very good double disc of ambient music based on the Smile's OK collection of tracks. For those who enjoyed the instrumental tracks on the This Mortal Coil albums, this will be perfect.But if you want another set of Ivo-inspired cover versions, you will indeed be very disappointed.Enjoy this record ... but in a very chilled out kind of way ;-)

I never wanted This Mortal Coil to end, so presumably like many others invested a lot of wishful thinking in Hope Blister. I will it to be different even when it's playing. But Underarms is so ambient you barely notice when it stops. Any time spent with these seven shades of neutral would be better spent with the aforementioned TMC, or simply exploring other quarters of Ivo's canon.

As an owner of The Hope Blister's first album, "...smile's O.K.", as soon as I heard about this release, I had it on my wish list. The Hope Blister were described then as "sort of a sequal to This Mortal Coil", and having got two T.M.C. albums in my all time top ten, it was no surprise that I liked Smile's O.K. very much too. With glorious vocals by Louise Rutkowski, how could it fail to impress? So it came as a massive let down to hear Underarms and Sideways. When I first put it on, I thought my CD player had gone wrong. The first track consists of several minutes of nearly constant noise, taken from one tiny snippet of "Is Jesus Your Pal". Listening more closely revealed that there were other things going on, but far too little. The rest of the album isn't much better. There's nothing which you could call a "song", and several samples are copied from Smile's O.K., which, whilst being very much Hope Blister, it feels like cheating - not trying to think of something new.I'm going to give it a chance, but so far I can't imagine me listening to this much ,if at all, in the future. A real missed oportunity which I can't recommend to anyone.