DEATH BY CHOCOLATE

Jetset

More insulin-shock art-pop: Stereolab, Pizzicato Five

If the notion of a faux-'60s art-school retro act, sounding like Stereolab covering the Georgy Girl soundtrack, sickens you, you're never going to like Death by Chocolate. This Brit musical scheme sends its teenage ringleader--one Angela Faye Tillett--out to pose for publicity shots in pristine Mod flower-power outfits and a Burger King crown. That sort of thing. Problem is, I love the idea. And even I am disappointed by DBC's overlong and under-realized debut.

Tillett wants (ever) so badly to be charming, witty and clever that she conceptualizes away the pure, obsessive pop joy required to make this sort of thing work. Especially annoying are between-song spoken interludes wherein she free-associates colors with sensations and memories; they impart the unpleasant feeling of being read a grocery list.

Still, Tillett is a clever girl. The album has about an EP's worth of tracks that come off: "Salvador Dali Murder Mystery," an irreverent corruption of "I'm a Believer" and the Velvets' "The Murder Mystery"; the pleasingly childlike "My Friend Jack"; and especially "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out," a wonderful folk-pop cover of the duet from Harold and Maude. The album as a whole, though, is akin to an overly ostentatious gold-foil wrapper surrounding a smallish truffle. Christopher McQuain

VARIOUS ARTISTS THE GOLDEN AGE: A HISTORY OF EUROPEAN PROGRESSIVE MUSIC (CD-ROM)

Eurock

Eurock has also released several CDs, including a few by local space rock band Dweller at the Threshold.

Eurock, PO Box 13718, Portland, OR 97213

The early to mid-1970s were some of the worst times in rock's sordid history. Crappy, bloated, corporate arena bands ruled the airwaves, crying out to be destroyed by the coming punk revolution. But beneath the radar, far more interesting things were happening, like the whole krautrock scene, barely understood outside Europe and virtually invisible here in the US--and far more bizarre and experimental than mainstream prog-rock.

Published between 1973 and 1990, Eurock magazine was a lonely champion of this music on our shores, and it quickly expanded to seek underground experimental rock in every corner of the globe. Portland resident Archie Patterson, the man behind Eurock, has just released a CD-ROM containing every issue (over 1,500 articles and reviews in all) of the magazine, compiled and indexed. The high-tech format makes the magazine's interviews with obscure bands, reviews of records that now fetch a small mint on eBay, and other articles easy to access. A Media Gallery contains front and back covers of the issues as well as a trio of video clips. The videos of Amon Duul II and Popul Vuh (both taken from German television during the bands' primes in the very early 1970s), as well as the truly bizarre Urban Sax clip from 1980, are excellent. The 40 minutes of audio from Hiro Kawahara of Heretic--edgy ambient keyboard guitar drone stuff--are OK for what they are, though material from the actual "golden age" of '70s Europrog might have been more appropriate, especially if a wider variety of artists mentioned in Eurock had been included. This is a minor complaint, however, as the rest of this disc is a must for anyone who's gotten past Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler and wants to learn more about the music at the roots of a lot of modern sounds, from Moby to Tortoise to Stereolab. Rolf Semprebon