From Bulgaria with Love: The Pop Album

AMG Review of From Bulgaria with Love: The Pop Album

Bob Tarte
All Music Guide

Newly renamed for chart success, Bulgaria's premier, normally solemn choir cuts up with a babbling Italian rapster on a disc of computer-crazy house mixes. Equal parts horrible and marvellous, it's the Foucault's Pendulum of world music or an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 with sampling standing in for robot commentary. In fact, the flesh-and-blood choir has little real-time interaction with instrumentalists on this disc. It's mainly digital sleight of hand, with phrases and fragments of a few Le Mystere standards stuttering atop gothic machinations. No need to listen to the disc twice. Every bit of its undeniable pleasures can be harvested at the first and only hearing -- a truly audacious concept. Think of the hours to be saved if every new CD could be mainlined, savored, then discarded.