Stretched EP – YoYo / BNE

Bit of an oddity this one. My guess is you have already made up your mind whether a four-track EP by Infected Mushroom is something you really need. The only saving grace here is that at four tracks, it took hardly any time to review, though it probably took even less time than that to compile. Let the fun commence: The Live remake of Shakawkaw is something of a joke, taking no less than five and a half minutes to drop into something resembling trance, and when it does, it sounds like it’s being sung by the assembled cast of Fraggle Rock. The “orchestral” buildup sections move just like a musical, straight out of Lloyd Webber, and I for one would rather hear Michael Ball break into “love, love changes everything, etc” while having a complete set of regulation-size snooker balls inserted into my urethra. We then get track 10 from IM The Supervisor, Stretched which, as I may have remarked when reviewing the album (though frankly, I couldn’t care less whether I did or not), has the dubious honour of being a piece of music that is simultaneously interesting and incredibly, erotically, boring beyond belief. Yes folks, buy now what you bought last year – pick up a Tshirt on your way out. And a sticker for 50p. Timelock’s remix of Cities Of The Future is immeasurably better than the original, but still has those FUCKING vocals and a keychange from hell right at the end. Finally The Beauty & The Beat, tacked on at the end with grace and underproduced aplomb, yes folks you are allowed to pay to get an extra track, that was made available on Infected’s website months ago as a free download. And just as you might expect from an unreleased, cutting-room-floor trance tune, it’s undernourished, unfinished Infected-by-prinary-numbers, and almost completely devoid of any feeling, emotion, intelligence or direction. I mean, it doesn’t even have a fucking ending. Someone here is taking the piss – either the “boys” themselves or the cynical Geffen-emulators that run this label. I cannot imagine a CD release that is more superfluous. It is an insult to the sweatshop workers that assembled it, to the molecules of plastic that form the surface of the CD, and to the ones and zeroes of binary that make up this placid, frothy excuse for a CD. Whether it’s Infected or the label that are calling the shots here, I believe I speak for a certain majority here when I ask you squarely to fuck the fuck off you fucking fuckbunch of fucking fucks.