Generally speaking, it's a good idea to avoid really obvious puns, lest you be frowned upon by people with oversensitive limits to their humor aesthetic. Nonetheless, it's difficult not to fall subject to the temptation of wondering what happens when the Irresistible Force meets the Unmovable Object. Naturally, we can only do this figuratively. Therefore, we will represent our Irresistible Force with the third and latest album from the Irresistible Force, It's Tomorrow Already. Our unmovable object will be our test listener, Jan, who hates electronic music.

Now Jan is the type of person who honestly believes that every song ever written by Credence Clearwater Revival made it into the top three of the pop charts, that musical "black boxes" should all be burned, and that raver kids are all abominations of the human race. Okay, you gotta give Jan a little respect for that last bit, but to make sure that Jan was as influenced as possible, we created a simulated "chill room" for our test environment. We gathered Christmas lights (the blinking kind), a lava lamp, a color wheel, and a big comfy couch. Then we burned some incense and set Jan to listen. The object was to see how Jan reacted to each of the tracks on the new album, to put the old cliché to the test. Oh yeah, we also locked the doors.

The first track, "Power," had Jan yawning. Basically an electronic anti- politics political song-- she screamed on the couch begging for us to put on a Bob Dylan disc instead. By the time "The Lie-In King" (the disc's second track) kicked in, Jan was either lulled by the smooth- flowing textures into relaxing a little, or was beginning to accept her predicament and mellowing out a bit.

"Nepalese Bliss," a song about a drug so powerful that it's an actual religious experience, came around. Jan actually began to groove a little. Okay, groove is perhaps an exaggeration. And it may only be because she could relate to the song, but her head did begin to bob around some. All the same, she even began to close her eyes in concentration.

"Fish Dances," the sixth of eight tracks in the 63- minute Jan experiment, may have been the track that finally caught her attention. She explained that the playful yet introspective poem that accompanied the similar music reminded her of poems the Moody Blues would create and insert at random intervals in their albums. This is when we suspected that Jan was undergoing a side experiment herself. That, and the joyful expression on her face upon recognizing the Mr. Rogers samples in "Playing Around With Sound."

The verdict? Well, Jan isn't going to go out and buy this Irresistible Force album, and probably no others. If you're looking to convert somebody into the fascinating worlds that can be opened with electronic music and ambient trance in particular, this isn't the one to do it with. However, it does have enough of that smooth, trancy feeling to keep even the uninitiated listening-- even if you do have to give them the drugs first.

-Skaht Hansen

"Power"

[Real Audio Stream]