Mercy Street | Loppylugs

Submitted by Martin Lewis on 20 July 2014 - 9:32pm

Cover:

Artist:

A Reminiscent Drive

album-ID:

a_153

Nationality:

Belgium

Year:

1 997

Release-year:

0000

Num-of-tracks:

Track-listing:

Life Is Beautiful*Leg Show*N.Y.C. Dharma*Serenade (To The Sound Of Peace !)*The King And The Elephant*True Love ...*Like Twins*Back To Morocco*Mercy Street*Codes Of Silence*There's Always Somebody To Say You're Wrong !*Footprints*Two Sides To Every Story*New Jerusalem*I Want To Remember This Moment Always*Relief

Length-in-mins:

Nominator:

Bean

meeting-ID:

m_60

Now-num:

2 014

Grooveshark-URL:

Mercy+Street/5255039

Short-title:

MercyStreet

nominator-ID:

u_22

Meeting-date:

Tuesday, 23 September 2014

MusicBrainz-URL:

57e8eb99-5978-3e79-9d33-71fed556d554

Discogs-URL:

A-Reminiscent-Drive-Mercy-Street/master/43102

Allmusic-URL:

mercy-street-mw0000509330

code

Some global variables used across pages

code

this is code for each album page, to be hidden

review-form data

guest-list data

108

109

117

reviewers-IDs data

-22-

-14-

-1-

-13-

-2-

85

reviewed by

Martin Lewis

No computers were harmed in its making

1-5-6-9-15

Mercy Street released in 1996 is the first of Paris born Jay Alansky's albums as Reminiscent Drive, the other album released under this name being Ambrosia. To me Mercy street is much the superior of the two albums.

The music is electronic ambient music of the highest order, moody, evocative, experimental and explorative with weaving atmospheric melodies and snippets of random speech as the only lyrics. There is much to remind me of the Boards of Canada album 'Music has the Right to Children' although tracks like Footprints remind me of Bowie's Sense of Doubt from Heroes . Amazingly no computers were used in its making, Jay just used an 8 track tape machine. Personal favourites on the album are New Jerusalem and Relief.
65

reviewed by

Richard Norbury
60

reviewed by

Glyn Lewis

There’s Always Somebody To Say You’re Wrong

2-7-13

9

I saw this described as ambient and / or down-tempo, and I didn’t feel it fitted well into either category. It isn’t dropped back enough into the distance to be ambient, where you could get away with big washes of generally shapeless pieces. And it rarely had much of beat, which might usually help to give some drive to down-tempo stuff. So it felt a bit like it was falling between two metaphorical stools.

After a number of plays I still found it largely anonymous but eventually I warmed to it a bit and found it a fairly pleasant listen but still feel it is a bit slight and lacking any textures and shape or any hooks to really engage the listener. It just smoothly passes by without being noticed.

There is some able piano playing on Like Twins and Footprints, both of which had a nice improvised feel. They might be a bit noodley but I found them a refreshing change from the generally more unvarying compositional patterns. It's a difficult thing to do, to create an album of entirely instrumental pieces and without using much beats, I think you have to really be doing some other clever stuff elsewhere to give some focus. He did steer clear of a cheesy musak feel to the pieces on here, which is good going as we are in that sort of territory. Pleasant enough, but I guess that's not really high praise.
58

reviewed by

Neil Hornsey

Teetering on the border of cheesiness

As ambient/downtempo albums go, this isn't a bad effort. Personally I prefer something a little more mysterious/spacey/psychedelic but this has its moments. It shows its age with some rather tacky, cheesy elements such as cow bells and very obvious 90s drum sounds, but the synth work is clever and well layered, with a recurring theme throughout. If you're in the right mood, it can hit the spot.
50

reviewed by

Matthew Baker

Cafe del Martin Lewis

1

Chill out electronica stylee stuff. This sort of thing needs to be really good to avoid sounding liek wallpaper.

He just about pulls that off but not a resounding success,