101 Damnations (album)
| 101 Damnations | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
_cover.jpg) |
||||
| Studio album by Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine | ||||
| Released | 15 January 1990 | |||
| Recorded | 1989 | |||
| Studio | Important Notice Studios, Mitcham | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 55:17 | |||
| Label | Big Cat UK | |||
| Producer | Carter USM and Simon Painter | |||
| Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine chronology | ||||
|
||||
| Singles from 101 Damnations | ||||
|
||||
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
101 Damnations is the debut album by Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine. Its title is a reference to 101 Dalmatians.
101 Damnations establishes the band's style, musically fusing drum machines, samples and "often blasting guitars" and lyrically displaying "empathy for the rejects, go-noshers and losers of the world" whilst "wedded to a fusion of endless cultural references" and puns.Ned Raggett of Allmusic characterised the album's musical style as "brash, quick, punk/glam via rough early eighties technology pump-it-up pogoers" and described the heavy usage of puns as "Carter's calling card as much as anything" and noted that "buried underneath all the one-off lines like 'It was midnight on the murder mile/Wilson Pickett's finest hour' is a huge, beating heart."
"Sheriff Fatman" was highlighted as displaying the album's characteristic sound; Raggett said "the song itself may be about a total rat-bastard of a slumlord, but the name of the game is energy and fun." The band's "tender, soppy side" is revealed in "Good Grief Charlie Brown" which alludes to "the familial screw-ups", and "An All-American National Sport" which is about a "homeless person torched by two strangers." "G. I. Blues" is an unsubtle, emotive anti-war song which closes the album "with a lighter-waving end-of-the-concert sweep."
It was originally released in 1990, on Big Cat Records, then reissued on Chrysalis Records peaking at number twenty-nine on the UK Albums Chart.
The album - apparently recorded on a shoestring budget - was widely praised at the time of its release in the music press ("Staggering.." concluded the Melody Maker review for example) as a refreshing antidote - and a kick up the backside - to the drug-infused 'baggy' scene that was prevailing at the beginning of the 1990s. Whilst most of the chart contemporaries were extolling the virtues of ecstasy and loved-up hedonism, Carter USM offered a brutally bleak - but no less sardonic and cutting - worldview of social injustice, moral decay and urban violence, bringing the whole post-baggy party crashing back down to earth. Their twin guitar offensive, played over banks of keyboards, programmed sequencers and a particularly prominent drum-machine, drew comparisons in some critics' eyes to a 'punk Pet Shop Boys'...something which even one of the band members, Les "Fruitbat" Carter, happily agreed was indeed accurate.
...
Wikipedia