Venetian Snares - Cavalclade of Glee & Dadaist Happy Hardcore

In a time where drum n’ bass has become the soundtrack to both the boy racer lifestyle and the rave/dance culture, it is refreshing to be assaulted by breakcore; too hyper to drive to without crashing and too intense to properly shake a leg to… If I had been involved in the pills scene, I’m pretty sure breakcore would have been my 20th century solution to the decidedly bland and repetitive scene.

I’m not saying you need to be tripped on acid or pills to listen to this, but when garage, rave and drum n’ bass were the ‘freshest’ shit going, I could have imagined it being comparable to the exhilarating experience I first felt when listening to this record.

Cavalcade of Glee & Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms is an awesome record that ranges from the tripped out, to frantic, to unquestionably beautiful and epic.

This album is based solely on fast and frantic beats, yet this does not outweigh the tripped out samples of the album. The often repetitive and haunting vocal samples used on the tracks set this tripped out tone for the tracks, not making it clear whether the songs should be listened to with a degree of subjectivity or just enjoyed for what they are.

The last two tracks P and Cancel combine into one exceptionally epic song. P is a synth track, with no drums, that lasts for around two minutes and sets the scene for the perfect build-up that is Cancel. Cancel is a fantastic build up that suggests so often that the song is going to turn into another frantic break session, yet it never seems to truly reach its climax, even though some of the breaks that are being played are pretty intense. It constantly slides between the calm and the frantic until it finally fades out on the synth. Impossible to describe, get it and find out what I so unskilfully have tried to say.

One thing that stands out to me about all the stuff done by Venetian Snares is that it seems relatively tame. Tracks like Plunging Hornets and Vache are frantic and fast-paced, yet they don’t seem to feel as aggressive as tracks by artists like Shitmat. However, this is by no means a particularly negative aspect to the album. Venetian Snares have undoubtedly one of the best breakcore sounds going and even without this aspect of heaviness the songs speak for themselves and excel within their own criteria.

If you are interested, you can pick it up from Amazon for about £6.50