Cutting the Edge (vinyl)

Pop from the experimental laboratory: double album by the world-famous electro-pop group.

As always, the Chicks On Speed have been very busy since their last album Press The Spacebar: In addition to video shoots, art installations, lots of fashion, the Girl Monster compilation and exhibitions around the world, the electro-pop group around Melissa Logan and Alex Murray-Leslie still found time to record an album. And what a thing!

Cutting The Edge uses the Kollektief as a mechanism for creating spontaneous sounds, the Chicks worked with Whomadewho, Mark Stewart, Joe Robinson, A.L. Steiner, Kathi Glas, Anat Ben David, Christopher Just, Fred Schneider, Patrick Pulsinger and the British producer team A Scholar and Physician. The 23 tracks on the double album were created in hotel rooms, trains, bathrooms, art gallery basements and live during performances at MOMA and the Center Pompidou.

They caricature the art scene, play with bubblegum pop, glamor and the dream of flying and sometimes sound so much like the B-52s that their Fred Schneider had to provide guest vocals via Skype. Experimental music has rarely sounded as pop-like as it does here.

BBC Review

They've probably released their masterpiece - Ian Wade 2009

Chicks On Speed, for the uninitiated, are an international art/music/clothing/film experience who are based in Berlin. For the past decade they've been releasing mission statements, not playing guitars, running a label and generally being an acquired taste. They once had their own club night where they created an installation piece which was called I Wanna Be A DJ, Baby. They stood behind DJ decks and smashed records while a sound collage tape was playing. Some Red Hot Chili Peppers fans may recall throwing bottles of wee at them when they supported them in London a few years back. On this, their fifth album, they've gone all wonky double album on us, and in the process probably released their masterpiece.

Cutting The Edge is a 24 track feast of what makes the Chicks so unique, and is more in line with earlier albums such as 2000's Chicks On Speed Will Save Us All and 2003's 99Cents, as opposed to the more challenging areas of their output such as their 2004 collaboration with the No Heads.