This randomly showed up in my mailbox last week, and I haven't been able to put it down since I popped it in my tape deck."Five Million Years" is the debut cassette from Favors, and anyone that digs on early 80's Manchester acts, and any "classic" electro-pop, is going to go bananas for this tape.Hints of New Order, ABC, Soft Cell, Cabaret Voltaire, and even Talking Heads, are all over the place, respectively.Favors are doing it right.It's all here, funky synth bass lines, heavy electro beats, icy synthesizer workouts, and the vocal hooks are cold and catchy.Some parts of Five Million Years lean more towards a rather modern electronica vibe, conjuring some more recent acts like The Faint, Holy Ghost, and Hot Chip.Whichever direction they are heading in, each track is really tasteful and easy to listen to, as this sort of thing can fall victim to the "generic" and "hacky" tags so easily, and they pretty much avoid that altogether.I didn't love every minute of it to death, but it's nice to see that someone is out there doing this kind of stuff well, really well.For a minute there, I was convinced that ecstasy was the only thing to make it out of that scene alive.If you are into this sort of dance revival, you will want to get a hold of this.Get a copy here.
Here at Cassette Gods, we've traditionally taken the view that positivity should be paramount on these pages. The thinking has been: "well this label/band/person only put out 100 copies of the tape anyway, why waste the time to dis on it", but after an intense 24 hour meeting of the Cassette Gods, fueled by coffee cake and Merzbow tapes, we've come to the conclusion that we will let the iron curtain of positivity fall, essentially opening the floodgates to a whole new era of bilious spew. I figured I'd be the first to make a crack in the dam of good intentions and post some reviews from the last few years that I thought it better not to write in the first place. So keep those tapes coming buckaroos!