Blue Man Group

Blue Man Group – Audio
Artist: Blue Man Group | Album: Audio | Style: Experimental, Alternative, Progressive Rock | Year: 2000 [1999 original] | Quality: DVD-Audio (MLP 5.1 96kHz/24Bit) | Bitrate: lossless | Tracks: 15 | Size: ~3.25 Gb | Recovery: 3% | Covers: in archive | Release: Blue Man Group Records | Virgin Records (7243 4 77893 9 7), 2000 | Note: Not Watermarked

Blue Man Group’s debut album, Audio, reflects over a decade’s worth of musical and theatrical innovation. While its whimsical, visually involving stage performances have been popular since the early ’90s, the group waited to make an album until it could find a recording space large enough to house its unique instruments, which include walls of drums, networks of plumbing pipe, and different lengths of vibrating fiberglass rods. Audio incorporates all of these instruments, along with baritone guitars, Hungarian cimbaloms (which are similar to dulcimers), and Chapman Sticks, into 14 eclectic instrumentals. These songs were written specifically for Audio and have never been performed at a Blue Man stage production. Though the spectacle of the group playing its sculptural, surreal-looking instruments is absent from the album, the complex, resonant sound of Audio is engaging enough on its own. In fact, the swooshing of the sword poles on “Utne Live Wire” and the fluttering angel poles on “Endless Column” sound even more alien without the visual accompaniment. Some of Audio’s pieces (“Drumbone,” “PVC IV”) spotlight a specific Blue Man-made instrument, while others (“TV Song,” “Club Nowhere”) display the group’s avant-garde pop sensibilities. “Rods and Cones,” “Cat Video,” and “Opening Mandelbrot” are other standout tracks from Audio, an album that proves the Blue Man Group is as innovative in the studio as it is onstage.

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Blue Man Group – The Complex
Artist: Blue Man Group | Album: The Complex | Style: Rock, Fusion | Year: 2004 | Quality: DVD-Audio (MLP 5.1 96kHz/24Bit, DTS 5.1 96kHz/24Bit, PCM 2.0 48kHz/24Bit) | Bitrate: lossless | Tracks: 14 | Size: ~7.03 Gb | Recovery: 3% | Release: © DTS Entertainment, 2004 | Note: Not Watermarked

After devoting more than 15 years to building their unique fusion of edgy performance and advanced yet home-brewed technologies, the Blue Man Group moves aggressively toward the mainstream with The Complex. “Mainstream” is, of course, a flexible notion, so what passes as commercial for these guys is a lot more adventurous than most of the era’s ear candy. These tracks adhere to clear song structures, with guest vocalists singing actual lyrics on original as well as cover material; a zombie-like cameo by Dave Matthews on “Sing Along” offers the wryest surprises. But an unmistakable imprint endures in the eclectic sonic references and, above all, thundering stage-oriented rhythms. The core members of the group play traditional instruments — in this case, ranging from standard-issue electric guitar to Hungarian cimbalom, heard most clearly in the opening seconds of “Above” — as well as their invented gear whose contributions to the din are, frankly, neither critical nor easy to discern. On their version of the disco classic “I Feel Love,” for instance, the 16th-note pulse created via sequencer for the Donna Summer original is mimicked by the device they call the Tube, giving rise to the question of whether using something new to do what someone else did with old stuff 20-plus years earlier is worth the effort. But this is, of course, beside the point: Although its inspirations, musical and conceptual, trace as far back as Kraftwerk, The Complex serves as a reminder that modern devices and glistening production values can be applied to the most primal creative instincts, if utilized by the right — blue — hands. (more…)