The GB Album Club 009 - The White Room by The KLF

Duders! Welcome to the ninth outing of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! For our eighth pick, a bunch of Swedish dudes screamed at us, only this time it wasn't the images that keep popping up in my head whenever I feel emotions I don't understand, it was the progressive metal album Måsstaden Under Vatten by Vildhjarta! This week, we cop some ecstasy from the dude outside the warehouse and sweat all over the dance floor with The White Room by The KLF! This album was picked by our good pal @shindig, and you can listen here:

Youtube

NOTE ON LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM:

• We are specifically listening to the 1991 UK release of this album, which is not available on streaming. (The version on all major streaming platforms is the 2021 "Director's Cut" re-release, which has a different tracklist and omits key songs.) For those of you in the know about The KLF, you probably know why. If you're not, you're about to have a very fun time on Wikipedia.
• The proper version of this album has "3 A.M. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)" as track 3. (And for more thoughts on "3 A.M. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)" and The KLF in general, a young man named Jeff Gerstmann provided some in his 2020 top 10 list.
• For whatever reason, most of, if not all, the uploads of the right version of The White Room that separate the tracks come with bonus songs. Track 9 is the actual last track.

Here at the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, we put a bunch of albums into a pool and we spin a wheel each week to find out what we're going to listen to. To participate in the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, all you gotta do is listen to the album and comment with your thoughts below! You can also come chill in our Discord! We're not taking new album submissions into the pool because we got enough there to last until pretty much the end of the year. But you can talk some music and be in on the next cycle! It's a good time.

I linked to Jeff's mini-essay about The KLF in his top 10 of 2020 list because that kicked off a minor KLF obsession in me. I knew some things about them, but I never dove deep. But having a weird fractured quarantine brain, I dove more into the history of the group itself than the actual music. (To be fair, when you have a group that fires a machine gun filled with blanks into an audience at an award show and burn all your money, you have an interesting history.) In the time since, I listened to Chill Out, which is fantastic, and I've listened to "3 a.m. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)" approximately three billion times. But I never listened to an actual album on their more ravey end until now.

Overall, I loved it.

There is one major flaw with this album for me, which is one of sequencing and structure. The general formula for album sequencing that works for me is to start high energy, explore slower stuff in the middle, and then ramp back up to the high energy and end there. (See: Fever by Kylie Minogue.) It's a nice mirroring of narrative structure in some ways. Leaving home only to return a changed person and all that. You start at a certain sonic palette, you explore different territory, and then you return to that original energy having experienced all that came before it. The White Room starts extremely high energy, slows down, and never ramps back up. I felt like I was denied a certain emotional catharsis or climax.

But I also feel like there's a lot more intentionality here than a lot of rave music. There's a lot of complexity to the way the songs are constructed and it incorporates a lot of out there sound choices that make this album feel indisposable in a way that a lot of rave music isn't meant to be. (I don't mean that as a dig at rave music or house or any of that, mind you. I'm just groggy and had trouble thinking of a different way of saying that.) It's party music, but very lovingly crafted and thought-about party music that feels like something bigger.

Plus it rips. I recently bought some overpriced noise canceling Sony fuckity blah blah headphones and... oh boy my hearing's fucked.

Favorite Songs: "Make it Rain," "3 a.m. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)," "Last Train to Trancentral (LP Mix)"

Revisiting it has definitely made me realise how much of it is coming down rather than winding up. I bloody love the Justified & Ancient reprise running through the whole thing but I largely come to the album for the heavy hitters.

What Time is Love made me realise Space Giraffe wasn't first with that sample. It might be my Phoenix Down moment. Plus that bassy breakdown was a pleasant surprise when I first heard it.

It's weird, I spent most of my time hearing about KLF rather than listening to their music. I knew the story and had them down as an ironic, guilty pleasure like some kind of novelty act. Now that I've heard a couple of their albums, there's more to it. Like, I'm sure it's a joke but they are at least telling it really well with The White Room.

Chill Out doesn't get its hooks into me like this album does and the stuff as the J.A.M.'s still smack me as novelty for the sake of trying to grab a No.1 hit. The White Room doesn't sound as desperate. It sounds strangely sincere.

It's iight.

I like the synths in What Time is Love because they scream 90's club scene which I have some nostalgia towards that general sound signature, and I'm down for more of that. Though I wouldn't say that the rest of the album is objectively "bad" or "too boring" as if EDM is supposed to be always on 11 and not have a chill or "coming down" side to it. But I do have more of an ear for Hypnotica by Benny Benassi and the Biz, Diary of an Afro Warrior by Benga, some other house/EDM artists the were featured in the Saints Row 2, 3 and 4, and Prince & The New Power Generation incorporating similar sounds with a few songs from Diamonds and Pearls and the Love Symbol Album.

This music club has made me realize that I have difficulties talking about music unless it is right in my wheelhouse. I recognized 3AM Eternal, and that is still a fun song. Last Train to Trancentral was the only other song that made me pick up my head and notice. I agree with the notion that this album kind of shoots its wad early and drifts down in the back half in an almost gentle manner. Otherwise, it really didn't stand out much for me.