Review Summary: GvsB follow their breakthrough record with the same absurdly heavy low sound built around two basses fighting each other while rusty menacing vocals top their groove but setting it to a suffocating party
It didn't take long for GvsB to come up with a follow-up for their thunderous Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby, and when you craft such a gemÂ*it is hard not to take it as a signature-defining record. Critics would sometimes blame them for doing so. But while Cruise Yourself does follow some of the same path, it's certainly not just no. 2 venus luxure baby.
Kicking the door as should be expected, opener "Tucked In" does get such aÂ*surprising uplifting twist at the end that it's able to fly overÂ*those who said they already heard something like it in their previous effort. Absolute standout "Kill the Sexplayer" would knock off anyone leftÂ*a little later on anyway with its verborrhaic vocalsÂ*over the vicious groovy instrumental created by the targets of this song narratorÂ*themselves. ("
Kill the drummer, he can't play", "
Kill the bass player, kill both bass players").
The narrator couldn't kill any of them, nor the noise, but the track almost seemed like it would kill the record itself when a troubled midsection comes along. The one highlight in it, "Explicitly Yours", though, is perhaps the better suited to show the unique character of the record, when confronted with their previous one similarly slow tracks ("Satin Down", "Get Down"). Here we're not talking about a quiet absorbing menace, but more of a decaying personÂ*getting wearierÂ*because of its lifestyle but trying to convince himself otherwise. Corroborating to that general aspect is the moody loungy organs dropped throughout "[i] Don't Got a Place" and "Psychic Know-How", the twisted "static-headed girl" "love" fantasy of "The Royal Lowdown" with its "
this ain't the good life/this ain't the bad life/this ain't any kind of life"Â*opening salvo and, sure, theÂ*hypnotizing loops of "Glazed-Eye"'s, luring the listener to fall in a bottomless hole, dizzily, as if he was cast to replace James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's
Vertigo.
If
Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby was drawing the audience to a cool dangerous party,
Cruise Yourself sees every one of them trapped in it, dancing, drinking and having sex, while still being desperate to get out, and much like a 90s version of Buñuel's
The Exterminating Angel, somehow unable to do so, crying out for one more martini while the key to the door would be at the other side of a phone call never to be made.
