Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain [ECD] (CD 2001)

One of the best albums of its time and a big favourite of mine. This ECD Bonus one is good, especially if you are a big fan or collector.

Goldfrapp is Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory. Alison has worked with Tricky & others and Will has made film soundtracks. Both seem to be as creative as each other and their first album, Felt Mountain, was so original and beautiful in its sounds that it won awards.

I like 'Felt' a lot; it's not just a collection of beautifully haunting and clever sounds, but also has some tracks that are really good as complete pieces of music. The whole album is well done in an avante garde way and is appealing to the ear. That is not an easy feat for this type of music. Alison's voice is perfect for this album.

I got this album after hearing segments of it from a friend. One of the first tunes was used in an early One2One commercial ad.
I can't say what i dislike about the album. Although, i could in their later albums.

I don't want to appear to be too off topic here, but think of this as a general sideline about this group, especially the next paragraph.

In their next two albums, they seem to have gone down a road that seems a bit too glammy and commercial for my liking. Having said that, though, I have to say that they still pulled it off in terms of making some of the best tracks in that genre. Some tracks and sounds are exceptionally good in these later albums. Hence, i bought these two CD's as well (yes, on eBay).

As a sound freak/connoisseur i was able to fish out various kinds of refreshing and interesting bits of music as well as whole tracks, like Black Cherry (Black Cherry Album), etc. So, even though some of this band's tracks can get a little irritating at times; for example, the commercial sounding Number One (Supernature Album), i would still consider this music set/duo as one of my best picks.

I don't know if her 'Number One' got to number one on the charts. It seems like they attempted to gain that kind of fame with their later album, at least to some extent. It wouldn't matter to me anyway, because I'm more concerned with rarer sounds than just your average pop music and they are also present in their 2nd & 3rd album.

It is evident that both Alison and Will are really into a variety of interesting sounds. They know they are good and feel that they can indulge in a bit of the material world of glam and fashion. I guess it gives them a broader audience as well.

They can almost do no-wrong in a way, because they did a humerous makeover on the Olivia Newton-John song: "Let's Get Physical" (ECD version of the Felt Mountain Album) and they actually transformed it into quite a good song! But i still can't get used to the lyrics in that song and now only listen to the initial base part of the track.

Speaking of which, this now sets up the next topic. This last track that i mentioned is on the ECD/Extended version of the Felt Mountain CD. If you have the money and you like this group, it is well worth getting, because it has some really good mixes of great songs like Utopia. You can listen to sound-bites of it at the HMV website. There are seven extra tracks on this ECD version and that's on top of the already nine tracks on the 1st CD. The PC content of this CD is ok; it has a short video feature on this interesting group. This is on the 2nd disk along with the extra tracks.
I have the digipack, album type set; the nice cardboard fold-out type.