Chrome - Alien Soundtracks/Half Machine Lip Moves/Red Exposure/Blood On The Moon

Alien Soundtracks
Half Machine Lip Moves
Red Exposure
Blood On The Moon

Initially, I only wanted to post Red Exposure and Blood On The Moon because those two never seem to crop up on other blogs. But then I thought since I've already got those nice 320k rips of Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine... sitting on my desktop, I might just as well share them too.

Chrome were a great band that never made a truly great album. Although the super-lo fi Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine... are their most revered records, for me they didn't really come into their own until Red Exposure. Like I already mentioned in my post on the last "canonical" Chrome album 3rd From The Sun, I find the ramshackle, tinny sound of Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine quite distracting. For all the awesome weirdness, experimentation and sense of daring, things remain sort of feeble sounding. Actually, I even find the production on the last three Edge/Creed albums a bit lacking, but having at least a bit of a recording budget definitely helped matters a lot. Also, Red Exposure, Blood On The Moon and 3rd From The Sun are simply much more consistent records with noticeably less unlistenable filler and novelty tracks.

Still, all the "classic era" Chrome albums are worth listening to and in a way there's also something poetic about the fact that - having never been captured adequately in the studio - Chrome remain one of rock'n'roll's most beautiful not-quite-fulfilled promises.

If you want to know how the first Chrome line-up without Helios Creed sounded, here's the debut album The Visitation. They were quite a different (and far more conventional) band back then. And if you want to know how the later, Creed-less incarnations of the band sound... well, don't bother. Those albums from the eighties and nineties really are as bad as everybody says: insipid, new wave-y schlock rock with ridiculously "doomy" vocal antics.

Oh, and before I forget: thanks to all the nice people on Demonoid (RIP) who let me nick their rips of Alien Soundtracks, Half Machine Lip Moves and Blood On The Moon.