Moodswings
Moodfood (1992)

review by: Chris Orcutt
Date: 7/19/00

As far as I know, nobody has ever heard of this, which is a total shame; it's about as good as music gets. I started to say "as good as electronic music gets," but that's really too limiting - it's simply great music.

The group Moodswings is really two producers named Hood and Showbiz. On the first tune, "Throw Off the Shackles" they establish a musical theme that they revisit in different songs throughout the CD. It's a great mellow groove at a smooth pace sprinkled with a piano (the subtitle of the CD is "Aural Medication for Tired Minds") and it perfectly sets up the rest of the CD. The tone of everything here is overwhelmingly positive; "Problem Solved" and "100% Total Success" sound exactly as their titles suggest. All the songs point to and build up to "Spiritual High", a 3-part 15-minute collage that my dad (who's a big band jazz fan) said was "downright inspirational." It starts with the theme and builds on that, and then different instruments and samples are slowly removed until there's just this wash of different sounds. Very softly, Chrissie Hynde (from the Pretenders) comes in with this heartbreaking love song that is probably the best thing she has ever done, and I'm a pretty big Pretenders fan. The music then returns to the original theme and closes out by putting Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech over the groove. It's really astounding. Honestly, just about every time I've just put this on in earshot of other people, someone comes over and asks what it is.

There's other guest performers (Jeff Beck plays on one song, a woman named Linda Muriel sings on another - she's great - and Johnny Marr helps out on production) but they never get in the way or overshadow the overall mood of the song or the CD. Some of the faster songs are a little frantic, but as a whole, this CD is fantastic. I bought it for the Chrissie Hynde song but once I listened to some of the other tunes, I realized I had one of the great, overlooked CDs of the 90s. Definitely.

Wow. I bought this CD based on Chris Orcutt's review (above) and I have to say, he is right on! Thanks Chris!

This is some fantastic music. I definitely wouldn't call it techno, even though it has some techno elements to it, such as some heavy bass and percussion in certain areas. (But this is the type of music that Techno evolved from.)

No, I would describe this as left-over 80's, ambient, Tangerine Dream, club music. But even as broad a description as that is, it's still too restricting a label.

There are a lot of different sounds on this CD, but Hood & Showbiz manage to weave them all together into, what seems to be, one continuous performance. (You can't skip around tracks on this CD, because each track overlays the other.)

You can definitely pick out the Johnny Marr influences with The Smiths-type sounds. Jeff Beck has an amazing guitar contribution on "Skinthieves". Almost a Pink Floyd/David Gilmore solo-type playing. And Chrissie Hynde just brings it all together with some great vocals that appear in the middle of that three-part collage called "Spiritual High".

An excellent CD that I know will be in my collection for many years. The best part about this CD, is apparently nobody knows about it, and I picked it up off eBay for $1.27 plus shipping.