STYLE... Alternative, Pop, Modern Rock

Home-brewed CD collection of folkadelic psycho-ambient experimental pop ditties from singer/songwriter/producer Robert Lurie.

REVIEWS...

""you speak in too many voices has a depth and charm reminiscent of Bowie's Hunky Dory and Neil Young's After the Gold Rush but with a style all its own." --Angus Nurse, The Independent Distribution Network.... "It's a fantastic sample of Lurie's diverse work." --J Mundok, The Kettle Black.... "One of the best CDs I've heard this year" --Don Campau, No Pigeonholes.... "Lurie displays a broad range of styles from solitary singer-with-guitar tunes to unique instrumental cuts which are strange and wonderful" --Bryan Baker, GAJOOB.... "I'd have to recommend this album for anyone that's not impressed by clone mainstream music" --Terry Allen, hEARd Magazine.... "Try landing on 'Vanishing Act' and 'Body & Soul,' fractured pop songs that roil to voices' surface like perfectly distilled chemical impurities" --Shannon Zimmerman, The Big Takeover.... "The first person dialogue of individual experience is very powerful on such mature cuts as 'interzone,' and most of the cuts feature a very spare, elegant -- I'd almost say even existential -- approach." --SD Fitzpatrick, Ink 19" --

"Lurie is an iconoclast. There are no two ways about it. Far past his sophmoric debuts of years gone by, he has established himself as a versatile and innovative musician. With the 1997 release of 'You speak in too many voices' we are presented with an amalgam of accretion; some would say folkpop, others, neo-alternative. The truth is it's neither, all and both. Eerily somnolent; sonorously benthic, like Poseidon playing a harpsichord in the atlantic's mariana trench, we get a glimpse of who made what is behind the tapestry of life.

It is sonorous. It is inventive. It is redolent of many styles. And it is the work of one man. A roller coaster ride through a land of blasted ashes and rebel clowns, carving hunks of meat off of strangely alien game on planets not yet discovered. But, with all behest, let me cease this madness and get to the root of our troubles. A newly coined word in the art world is; Surrational. Defined as a place above surreality, and below conceptualism, it is a slow dance to all that is avant-garde.

Rob's work is neo-beat, keeping alive the literary traditions of Kerouac and Hemingway by incorporating their ideals with those of the music world's, Lou Reed and Bowie. It is simply obsessive, turning what, at first glimpse seem to be grey and unrevealing landscapes into a place of history. He is a footsoldier of Bob Dylan. Classically lyrical, and prosodic in every way. At times the songs are vaguely reminiscent of the eastern indian traditions, such as in the seventh track on the album, Kashmiri skies.

On the eighth song, 'body and soul', we get a glimpse of the artist's mettle, as he proclaims, "It's not a question of silver, it's a question of gold". An enticing euphemism, blending metaphor with soliloquoy...a rhapsodic sound; highly imaginative, backs it. One step up the ladder we come into contact with an instrumental treatise, aptly titled, 'pills'. Here we get what sounds like a muzak version of the Mario Brothers video game soundtrack, on an elevator ride through Wonka's proverbial candy factory, newly reposessed by an owner named, possibly, Mick Jagger.

One step up, we recieve 'branca tonic' which inspires memories of William S. Burrough's treatise, Naked Lunch. And on to the eleventh song, 'all my girlfriends are getting married'. This one ends on a comical note as he wails, "they ain't marryin' me"; and you get a sense of Dylanesque humor. Moving on to track twelve, Lurie incants, "I used to want to be a star". This is oddly prescient of the current political climate in which familiarity has overshadowed fame. It extends into a tract on the nature of an artist's role in society, standing out by virtue of its solo production...a fine example of new American musicianship.

And down to thirteen. A show of intorversion in which the songwriter wails, "I'm so tired of my own hipocrisy". It takes advantage of using two vocal tracks for self backup. Now we come to piece fourteen, 'belong'. Fine muzak for a hotel lobby, it sounds like the theme to some unheard of Afghani video game with a turbanned hero battling legions of genies. In it are hints of Dave Navarro inspired guitar notes, backed with rolling native american drumbeats. And finally, #15, "I sleep alone". An abruptly short rhapsody which turns tail and prepares you for the next day.

It has been said that to create legends, we must go one step further each time and trust ourselves. Lurie seems to be travelling that path, and will no doubt rise to fame in the coming years.

" --Matthew Goad

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