Seattle Post Intelligencer Ultra Payloaded Review

[Mike]

Listen Up: Perry Farrell's Satellite Party
"Ultra Payloaded" (Columbia)

The heart and soul of both this debut and the Satellite Party itself is "Woman in the Window," the last song on the album. Made from a 30-year-old, unreleased Jim Morrison vocal track, Perry Farrell envelops it with a gentle, semi-symphony that methodically builds gossamer strings to a subtle climax around the mantra, "Just try and stop us, we're going to love."

As the album fades out, the message fades in. Farrell has hope for the future and that hope lies with artists, environmentalists, visionaries, poets and partygoers who have, according to the liner notes, "mastered the art of public assembly and demonstration."

Farrell goes so far as to christen this group in song: "The Solutionists." (Although Thievery Corporation's 2005 release "The Cosmic Game" featured another incarnation of essentially the same song with a different name, "Revolution Solution." Both versions were born of the union of Farrell and the electro-lounge duo. Consider the two songs twins attached by theme and ideology but different in that one has a maniacal guitar solo and the other doesn't.)

This project doesn't match nor top his Jane's Addiction high point, but it is the closest Farrell comes to the Bacchanalian spirituality and raw aggression of his former band.

Overall, the Satellite Party aims to be a hybrid of rock, hip-hop and house with symphonic flourishes and more importantly, the right BPM (beats per minute) so that DJs can mix any track from the album into a party, dance floor or ideally, both. There, Farrell hopes that communities will form.

It's noble in reason and, for the most part, it's successful. The one hiccup is "I tried to look away but can't resist/ I can't believe that you exist" of the tender ballad with the repeated one-word chorus: "Awesome." As a romantic love song, "Awesome" is painfully laughable. But when taken as a song from a father to his newborn child, which it is, this kind of cheese is allowed. (And it probably makes more sense if you're a parent.)

Otherwise, the richness of Farrell's wordsmithing lies in his tendency to pull images and references from the natural world, "Last night made me feel as real as the forces of nature," to quote "Mr. Sunshine" or his wry humor that mixes metaphors, "Insanity Rains." DOWNLOAD: "Woman in the Window"

-- Shawn Telford

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