reviews of taboos

the passage: taboos (cherry red 12")

an awesome revelation: the constrictive pedagoguery of dick witts giving way to one of the year's mightiest sounds, an enormous, gothic 124 bpm cacophony whose massed frenzy of keyboards pile up like a mountain of bavarian wurlitzers. if you can imagine a gigantic dance floor in some space-age gothic cathedral, with wagnerian avalanches of tympani, pipes and chimes (almost beyond 'river deep, mountain high') then this would be its dj's piece-de-resistance.

"whoever wants to dance with me must abandon traps and trickery," challenges witts, and the sound does nothing if not bear him out.

i shall refrain from attempting lucid description of the other side's 'taboodub': to call it an "instrumental" seems slightly futile.

the passage risk high excess, but as a blast of pure apocalyptic madness amidst the predominantly tight-fisted native scratchings i've had to sort through that's not exactly unwelcome. as with the associates' 'kitchen person', you either take the plunge or hide in a zoot suit.

unknown, 1981