Suckadelic – Supervillains
Let me see if I can even explain this one. Supervillains is an aural tribute to the pantheon of megalomaniacal geniuses from ’80s pop culture, back before fictional bad guys had to have a more logistically manageable agenda than ruling the world/universe. The equally evil remix geniuses known as Suckadelic basically combine sound clips, quotes, the sound effects from old video games, hip-hop style musical backing and the occasional snippet of soundtrack music to create a meeting of the minds that no superhero in his right mind would want to face – or at least hear from all at once.
The villains we’re talking about here are sound clips from classic Galactica’s Baltar and his Cylon minions, Gargamel, Skeletor, Ming the Merciless, and even Mezmeron, the overlord of the animated Pac-Man’s ghost monsters. And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. Music from all of those shows seep into the proceedings, along with sound clips from Atari 2600 games like Missile Command, Yars’ Revenge, and Space Invaders. In short, the stuff that world and/or universal domination in the ’70s and ’80s was made of. – bad guys you love to hate.
But will you love to hate Supervillains? I’ve found it best to try to absorb this occasionally hilarious sound-montage-over-breakbeats in small doses. I’d probably have to be on something to take the 
whole CD in one sitting. Many of the clips are hysterically funny out of context, mashed up against each other and pureéd into a big foamy mess of nostalgia. After just a few tracks, though, it becomes readily apparent that most of these songs are drawing from the same material, and only the emphasis is changing.
But in small doses? Supervillains is diabolically funny stuff.
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- Intro (2:04)
- Supervillain Fanfare (3:35)
- Traitors In The Midst (1:21)
- March Of The Suckbots (3:45)
- Powergrabs (3:33)
- Eternia’s Greatest (5:12)
- Cobra Stops The World (5:02)
- Mean Ol’ Wizard (4:03)
- Ball Of Evil (4:41)
- Gremlin Dust (5:35)
- Behold, Galvatron! (4:15)
- Plots And Schemes (2:45)
- The Malice Of Mezmeron (3:11)
- Master Of The World (2:50)
- Villain Invader Break (1:22)
- Hail Ming! (Ruler Of The Universe) (6:01)
- Trial By Stone (3:33)
- Galactic Super Battle (3:59)
- The Price (6:05)
- Bonus Track: The Nightmare (2:36)
Released by: Suckadelic Records
Release date: 2004
Total running time: 75:28
early footnote in ambient music, but let’s not forget that it does exactly what it says on the box. And for that reason, I’ve gotten very well acquainted with it indeed and can recommend it to anyone whose baby needs some tunes of their own. 
It’s official – I must live on another planet, because I missed the music industry hype around the Strokes’ second album, released in 2003. I gather that some of the fans accumuated from their first album in 2001 didn’t dig this one, but as I haven’t heard that one, I really enjoyed Room On Fire. Its eleven songs are compact, economical morsels of catchy-as-hell power pop with almost insanely hummable hooks.
I’m a sucker for just about anything 80s, so when I happened upon The Best Of Spandau Ballet, I was intrigued – like most casual listeners, I could really only think of “True” and, at a stretch, “Gold” as being recognizable songs for this group. I liked their sound (though, truthfully, True was overplayed to death in its day), but it’s rather like the Romantics’ best of album – aside from one of two songs that everyone knows, what else would be on here?
In 1998, alt-pop rising star Ben Folds took a breather from the then-hugely-successful Ben Folds Five to cook up a side project, more for fun and experimentation than anything, called Fear Of Pop. Two tracks on that album were basically spoken-word poetry/rants set to music, with the poetry honors done by none other than William Shatner of Star Trek fame. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean than Ben’s a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie, but he has at least copped to an admiration for Shatner’s previous album of music/poetry, The Transformed Man. And lo and behold, enough mutual admiration emerged between Folds and Shatner to spark this little CD called Has Been.
Seth Sternberger, the indie remix guru behind the sublime 8-Bit Weapon, also does the modern thing – and does it well – in Unfortunate Brain Chemistry. Seth’s jams run the gamut from traditional techno to the 2001 entry in the “Fifth Element Diva Dance competition” (something I award to the first person in a given year who sticks a beat on top of an operatic female vocal). The operatic track in question, “Venus”, is a beauty, and its placement early on in the tracklist nicely subverts whatever expectation you might have of what you’re listening to. Other favorites on here include the childlike-but-mechanical “Robot Kindergarten”, some retro kitsch courtesy of “Trite Little Disco Bunnies”, and the drum-heavy “Agonizing Truth About Love”.
Ah, Steely Dan, love ’em or hate ’em. The brainchild of jazzy rockers Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Steely Dan was an experiment to bring rock and jazz together, an experiment that not everybody welcomed – and yet somehow, the group scored two massive hits with their 1972 debut, the slinky rocker “Do It Again” (whose lyrics allude somewhat nebulously to shady deeds going down) and the more upbeat and yet still lyrically cryptic “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”. And from there it was uphill in the charts, and downhill in the critics’ reviews, all the way.
So…what if someone took the traditions of rockabilly and the blues and shoehorned them into a new-wave sound? Wouldn’t that be cool? This seems to have been the train of thought pushing the Steve Miller Band’s Abracadabra down the tracks 20-odd years ago, and for those who picked it up on the basis of the truly cool title track (which, at the time, was a huge single, absolutely inescapable on radio), the bulk of the album may have been a major disappointment. In hindsight, it sure was for me.
some newfangled effects on traditional rockabilly and blues riffs does not a new sound make, and in any case, Dave Edmunds did it better on Information a year later. Still, this is a rare case where I’ll recommend an entire album to you if only on the basis of its one extraordinary single. It’s just too bad that Abracadabra the album wasn’t as beguiling as “Abracadabra” the song.
If this album is a good example of anything, it’s a good example of how not to pick the lead track of an album. Counting The Beat is an interesting 1981 set by The Swingers, a band formed by former Split Enz guitarist/vocalist Phil Judd and featuring future Midnight Oil bassist Bones Hillman and guitarist Michael Den Elzen (who later sat in as a session player on Tim Finn’s fourth solo album). The problem with Counting The Beat, however, is wading through the first two tracks before getting to the album’s real meat.
“What’s this?” I asked. “A Paul McCartney tribute album benefitting cancer charities and featuring the Finn Brothers? Sign me up!”