Add N To (X)- Loud Like Nature

Label: Mute

Released 2002

With the rise of all things fun, sexy, and trashy in electronic music, the time seems right for Add N to (X)'s campy yet challenging aesthetic to gain more appreciation. The group seizes the opportunity on Loud Like Nature by mixing their crazed analog synth experiments with more pop song structures and simpler, more streamlined arrangements. Essentially, it's the same approach they took on the somewhat muddled Add Insult to Injury, but this time the group finds a better balance of the simple and the strange, making Loud Like Nature their most exciting album since Avant Hard. It also manages to be their most focused and yet diverse work, spanning the poppy, dysfunctional lust of "Sheez Mine" and the expansive "Invasion of the Polaroid People," which features vocals by rock legend/old coot Kim Fowley on two tracks. It's the group's ability to be absurd, experimental, and catchy all at once that makes them so hard to place in the world of electronic-based music -- they're too scattered and quirky to truly belong with the wave of electro-clash artists, but too song- and rock-oriented to belong with more "serious" electronica. Fortunately, their misfit status is precisely what makes them so interesting, and Loud Like Nature reaffirms them as accessible iconoclasts.

Track listing:

1. Total All Out Water
   
2. Electric Village
   
3. Sheez Mine
   
4. Invasion Of The Polaroid People
   
5. Party Bag
   
6. Quantum Leap
   
7. Pink Light
   
8. Up The Punks
   
9. Take Me To Your Leader
   
10. Lick A Battery (Tongues Across The Terminals)
    
11. .- U Baby
    
12. Large Number
    
13. All Night Lazy