Steve Gilmore Reviews: Fear 2 Stop - Interstellar Bounce

Fear 2 Stop - Interstellar Bounce

Hear The Track Here

Speaking as a recipient of some splendidly vitriolic reviews in my time (that's people dumping on my music and not the other way around), the attributes that serve best are thick skins and resilience. Sure, it hurts when someone tears your music apart but it is, after all, just an opinion and should be taken with the requisite 400lbs of salt. When it all comes down to it, the only person who SHOULD know what they are doing with your music is you - all else is just chaff. Imagine if, for example, the Manchester based band The Fall took notice of their earlier reviews or for that matter some of the bigger names around who struggled in their early years against critical opprobrium. You justy gotta be true to yourself at the end of the day and just get on with it, and that is where this review finally turns to the subject at hand - yet another track from Fear 2 Stop.

Having borne the brunt of acres of bad comments from me, F2S show incredible resilience (yeah, stubborness too) but - bless 'em - they keep ploughing their own particular musical furrow and there's nothing wrong with that. The latest track, Interstellar Bounce, is a revamped track from their past (a distant past at that) and to get the full story I have to go back in that history too. IB started as a section of a track called Battle Sequence which - as you can imagine - is a kinda/sorta game soundtrack that works surprisingly well, given that's it an older F2S track originally written in 1989. Instellar Bounce is the revamped later section of that work, and given my antipathy towards this kind of electronic experimentalism, I found myself quite taken by the track.

OK, you can pick your jaw up off the floor now...

Moreover, Instellar Bounce shows an increasing sophistication in sound techniques which I feel will help F2S enormously to overcome the dreadful image some of their past tracks have conjured up for many of us. The really weird thing is that I don't dislike this band, in fact I admire their persistence in the face of my many doubts. Mind you, we've also been here before too, when I think they are about to make a breakthrough only discover them going back to the same aural traps with the next track. Nonetheless, there's a quality about this track that I do like (besides it's incredibly short 3:37 length), there is a bounce to the track that I feel will earn F2S a bit more kudos than is normally evident. Certainly the band have some die hard fans who do seem to like whatever they put up despite my constant and never ending grumbles. Well, here is one track I cannot find much to grumble about at all, and that is definitely a step in the right direction.

Surprisingly accessible electronica with a definite bounce...