Track Listing

1. Thunnk
2. Circle of Sorrow
3. Don't Ask
4. Hater
5. Soho
6. Lost
7. Sir
8. Sweetness
9. Deadman
10. Today
11. The World Is Gone
12. Fly

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #129570 in Music
• Released on: 2006-10-24
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
Hotly anticipated debut abum from the awkwardly named Various (no, this isn't a compilation...) who some of you will be familiar with through their limited edition singles which we've been selling over the past year or so, all featuring beautiful drawings on their sleeves, just like the ones that feature in the artwork for this release. Various make dubstep-inspired dark, paranoid, grainy, desolate, bleakly melancholic beat-driven tracks which sometimes incorporate sung vocals, and they also make ethereal, equally melancholic, acoustic folky tracks that sit side by side with their beat-y stuff surprisingly well. This is a consistantly excellent album that has wide appeal and deserves your attention! If you liked Massive Attack's Protection album (and if you didn't you 're part of a small minority!) then you will likely love this. Buy it now before its inevitable appearance as the soundtrack to a bittersweet BBC series about the lives of yuppie lawyers!

Customer Reviews

various is varied
I thought I'd try this out based on a recommendation. I think it's very strongly reminiscent of Faithless (but without beats) in mood and execution as well as of the already-cited Massive Attack. Still, even after a few listens, I found myself wishing Various would either employ a few additional keyboard sounds/programs, or that they would not repeat them so often. The odd schizoid jumble of folky stuff (but, in a This Mortal Coil-ish vein) with scratchy urban-noise-riddim electronic atmospheres does work in a surprisingly not-so-jarring way. However, the female vocals tend to stray a bit too much towards overly-sincere Dido and Natalie Merchant for my tastes. The brittle album-closer "FLY" is my favorite track, sounding sort of like if Sandy Denny sang with His Name Is Alive.

almost perfect
There is a fairly wide variety of songs on this release, and I felt that they all worked well in their own respective space...with the exception of one song, "Soho". I listen to a lot of ambient, non-lyrical music because I think that bad lyrics ruin most otherwise fantastic songs. This song is a perfect example: "get me a drink, take away all sorrow...take away my reason" and other ridiculously common lines completely distract from the powerful underlying structure of this song. None of the lyrics in any of the rest of the songs are extremely insightful...but they flow and mix with the rest of the music well, and aren't so woefully obvious. This single, exceptionally pathetic song sounds like it was written according to a middle school student's impression of what a world-weary adult would sound like. It really hurts the release, but it's definitely still worth purchasing.

Just what I was looking for
I'm a long time Portishead fan and I've been looking for something new to try out. This fit the bill perfectly.