Solex - Laughing Stock Of Indie

You know, this whole thread never actually talks much about the actual album.

I had downloaded like four songs from it before eMusic crapped out on me one day. I always liked the tracks I had, and kept meaning to get the rest, but it was one of those things I never got around to. I was sort of lukewarm about her earlier records.

Anyways, her name came up recently in the Dutch Artists thread, and I finally got the rest of the record. Really, really like it a lot. It's much more rock (albeit in a fractured way) and "indie rock" than her other stuff, to my ears. Much of it actually reminds me of the kind of stuff that Kim Deal might come up with if she worked w/samples instead of instruments. Wish there was more about it in this thread, and I wish she'd reappear.

Saw her opening for My Bloody Valentine in Eindhoven/NL, last May. Weird choice, I thought. As for the performance, I found it horrible. Screechy, squeaky vox, coarse sampletop musics - didn't work for me at all.

I was at that same show. I've never seen an audience so bored by a performance. But then again, who's idea was it anyway to have Solex as an opener for MBV?

I really love her cover of Pavement's "Shady Lane."

I just heard that for the first time and it is really great! Apparently it horrifies a lot of Pavement fans (I should find something better to do w/my time than read buyer reviews of Pavement cover albums).

She also has a cover of "1969" up on her website, which is nice though not as cool as Shady Lane. The way she sings, "Oh my god" is like a billion times better than Malkmus.

Happy to announce the release of:
Solex vs. Cristina Martinez + Jon Spencer.
European release: February 5th. 2010 / out on Bronzerat Records.
In the US and Canada: end of March / out on Arena Rock Recording Company.
http://images.vpro.nl/images/42682424+s(500)

"Solex Ahoy! The Sound Map of the Netherlands" is really cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE8dLFCNfyA

Solex is one of the most underrated artists on ilx/in general iMO

When was the last time I listened to Solex vs. The Hitmeister? God knows, but it's 2020 now and music at large still hasn't caught up to her trip in 1998.

i really liked that album and never consistently listened to anything since, which was a big mistake and will rectify.

Hitmeister is such a joyous record. The first 3 Solexes feel like a really criminally neglected set these days? There's so much to dig into on all of them.

Has she put anything out since Sound Map of the Netherlands?

from my cursory google, it doesn't look like it.

"Sound Map..." is awesome, different from the earlier collage-albums but still super-fun

Solex IS the most underrated of all time imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPHtynsD1so

It's one of the rare things where the concept behind an album kinda degrades it, the description of how this album was made sounds kinda dopey but the results are ridiculously good

God, I was so into Solex back in the day. I never even heard about Sound Map, seems like it's worth checking out.

Nice revive!

Yeah I've listened to Low Kick hundreds of times, she is so great. I don't remember who wrote about Max Tundra (was it Dominique?) and said that "there is possibly an alternate timeline where Tundra's music became the seminal touchstone for the next decade of electronic music instead of what we got" and I feel the same way about Solex

Honestly it really feels like a whole amorphously defined late 90s-early 2000s stretch of music needs a kind of gentle new appreciation -- nostalgia cycles at work granted but with a distance there's almost an embarrassment of riches evident that got squashed for a variety of reasons (not solely musical of course but the whole tedious Strokeswave and after was such a blight).

I thought that the adjacent-to-electroclash nerds of the time (Blechdom, Tundra, 606, Solex, Cornelius, PTR etc) were kind of landfilled along with electroclash (which itself is imo due for a reassessment)

Yeah, agreed on that point several times over.

Solex always felt sui generis to me. I used to try to play their music alongside a lot of electroclash type sounds but it always felt to me people just weren't really getting down with it. Their loss! It definitely feels (and sounds) overdue for a revive.

Strokeswave was such a tsunami that it managed to flood into the world I was inhabiting at that time which was generally very resistant to any sort of conventional band inteference.

I'd known about her Pavement cover, but never knew about her cover of "The Cutter" until today. :O

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaFSvrHFDD4

Takako Minekawa is another similarly-under appreciated artist of the era that I vaguely associate with Solex.

Dawning realisation that the most clattery bits of Fetch the Bolt Cutters share a lot of DNA with Solex vs the Hitmeister

Ooh yeah