The guy from Thrill Kill Kult singing and Al doing guitars and synths…very nice. Sounds like Black Flag melded with The B52s. The guitar work is precious like early Edge and Robert Smith…the band’s overall sound stands on its own though.
Definitely impressive and this came out in ‘79, right? Damn, I was a baby…I’m really digging it lately and it’s pissing off a lot of passe’ metal heads at work so this Special Affect stuff is lotsa fun.
It’s one thing to play common nuwave that most people are familiar with but to throw this in and see the facial expressions of these lummox white collar dirtbags is priceless.
Aside from exploiting this record for a good laugh, it really is quite good…damn, Jourgensen and his pals are still surprising me after all these years.
Now if I could get him to stop smoking 3 packs a day and start singing like the great vocalist he used to be instead of his gutteral trite bark, I would be a very happy silly fuck[crazy][crazy][crazy][crazy]
it’s interesting to check out (especially videos with very very young al playing with special affect live that recently got on youtube) but really, they sucked.
There wasn’t anything really great about their music. It was interesting in that it was the precursor to two much better bands that came later, but that’s about it.
they released only one album called “too much soft living”.
maybe there were two singles as well (like "vertigo feeling).
other than that, i don’t know much…
It’s on Soulseek, because I’m on there right now. Al featured on “Too Much Soft Living” and at least the song “Vertigo Feeling,” which I have from the 2004 tour sampler. There’s another one called “Mood Music,” that I don’t think he was on.
Anyway, hit me up on Soulseek, username Christonabun - feel free to grab anything you like. Special Affect can be found in the “Ministry & Friends” folder; just be sure to share if you have anything not listed. [:)]
Oddly enough, Al was not on “Vertigo Feeling”… or if he did, he wasn’t credited. I think that track was just a throw-away on that sampler because Ryko was putting out both Ministry and TKK releases at the same time.
I’m still stuck in 1999 (dial-up/56k). I wouldn’t want to be a strain on your time. I’m sure the people I do download from likely want to kill me by the time i’m done, heh. Thanks though, and i’m going to do a search for it in a bit. And while i’m at it, i’m downloading “cold life” and “same old madness” right now. Never heard them yet, so i’m looking forward to that.
Found it and downloading now. So far i’ve only heard Nuclear Gloom which is ok. But it’s painfully obvious that these tracks were ripped off of vinyl, which is cool. The quality is good, but you can tell from the beginning, you just hear that sound when the needle hits. And i’m absolutely loving Cold Life. Didn’t get Same Old Madness yet though. I figure the special affect album will be my download of the night.
But this does kinda remind me of old cure (77-81), but mainly Three Imaginary Boys, but with synths - I guess it reminds me more of Seventeen Seconds, heh. Anxious to finish and listen to the rest though. I’ll post my review most likely tomorrow-ish.
Thanks for the You Often Forget single Christonabun, for some reason I didn’t mailorder it back then, and never thought I’d hear both versions. I agree the Special Affect album is pretty cool although I prefer the Blackouts among the members previous projects.
I got it last night and pretty quickly too. It’s cool, but it’s not what I was expecting. For some reason I was expecting more along the lines of With Sympathy, but it is good. And this would probably be the first time that i’ve ever heard Groovie Mann’s vocals. But it seems to remind me of the kinda sound the cure had around the time, which is a real good thing and probably my favorite era of that band. I’m sure it’ll grow on me a lot more, but I was just expecting completely different for whatever reason.
Good choices, Same Old Madness ROCKS best unreleased track ever… how did it even get uncovered I wonder? Oh… from the videos I suppose…
Yep. The best copy of the video/audio was taken from an original U-Matic professional grade tape that was supplied to a club in Houston (where Ministry often played, btw) by a DJ service. It was part of a compilation. How or why it included that unreleased Ministry video is beyond me.
The video was ripped straight off the U-Matic tape to digital for the best quality. The audio was cleaned up and sweetened a bit, and wound up sounding fantastic. I made a DivX version of the video off the original uncompressed digital copy, and I couldn’t believe how good it still looked.
Uncle Al seriously underestimates the quality of some of his forgotten older work. He could easily throw us a whole album worth of material like this and what wound up on “Early Trax” if he wanted to.
But isn’t Same Old Madness in the same pile of songs that Al would rather lock away and forget about? It is With Sympathy-era, isn’t it? I’d buy it if he did, but seeing as how he’s ignoring the synths and programming that got him where he is today, it’s doubtful. Still kinda shocked that he even re-released some of it for Early Trax.
BTW, finally actually sat down and listened to Cold Life. It’s kinda weird, heh.
[reply]Good choices, Same Old Madness ROCKS best unreleased track ever… how did it even get uncovered I wonder? Oh… from the videos I suppose…
Yep. The best copy of the video/audio was taken from an original U-Matic professional grade tape that was supplied to a club in Houston (where Ministry often played, btw) by a DJ service. It was part of a compilation. How or why it included that unreleased Ministry video is beyond me.
The video was ripped straight off the U-Matic tape to digital for the best quality. The audio was cleaned up and sweetened a bit, and wound up sounding fantastic. I made a DivX version of the video off the original uncompressed digital copy, and I couldn’t believe how good it still looked.
Uncle Al seriously underestimates the quality of some of his forgotten older work. He could easily throw us a whole album worth of material like this and what wound up on “Early Trax” if he wanted to.
–SKot[/reply]
Any chance of a lossless copy of the Audio SKOT? Suppose it depends how the digital copy was made in the first place. I remember seeing a copy of the video on someones site ages ago, looked like they had digital copies of the video… probably bad VCD rips. I have your divx copy, looks fantastic. I have a really terrible, high-gen VHS, dubbed from an orignal Promo, has a studio intro (title, whatever), then no pop-ups or anything through-out. However, awful quality.
the flac audio rip from vhs made by bisquitodoom was a part of huge torrent once on dimeadozen. i have the track, if you want the flac version of it, i’ll upload it somewhere.
Any chance of a lossless copy of the Audio SKOT? Suppose it depends how the digital copy was made in the first place. I remember seeing a copy of the video on someones site ages ago, looked like they had digital copies of the video… probably bad VCD rips. I have your divx copy, looks fantastic. I have a really terrible, high-gen VHS, dubbed from an orignal Promo, has a studio intro (title, whatever), then no pop-ups or anything through-out. However, awful quality.
I’ll see what I can do about getting a lossless copy out there. It’s important that we preserve this stuff, as obviously we’re not going to get any help with that in the official capacity. This copy is a direct analog-to-digital rip from an original U-Matic tape, which is much higher quality than a VHS tape… hence even the DivX version looking so good.